Streaming’s Super Bowl: Inside the Epic Showdown for Live Sports
It wasn’t long ago that all talk about Disney swirled around M&A. But veteran Disney QB Bob Iger changed the game when he recently called his unexpected trick play — the still-unnamed mega-sports streaming joint venture with Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox. Although those traditional media players rarely start for the same team, they teamed up here to leverage their collective muscle and singular vision to beat back Big Tech’s massive, greedy hands from grabbing the last great bastion for Hollywood-based television — live sports.
Live sports, of course, are essentially traditional media’s last stand against Big Tech streaming’s winner-take-all attitude. Live news’ numbers pale in comparison to sports. That played out yet again in spectacular fashion with the Super Bowl, which became the most watched television event in U.S. history with an astounding 123 million viewers. Sure, Taylor Swift had something to do with it (okay, she had a lot to do with it, haters be damned!). But the big game is just the pinnacle of what it represents — shared experience stuff you just gotta see live, as it’s happening, because you don’t want your Bleacher Report buddy ruining the ending.
Live sports pay the bills and are just about traditional media’s only kryptonite against Big Tech’s full Hollywood takeover. So, Hollywood can’t afford (both literally and figuratively) to lose them. But we know the game here. The numbers to acquire those coveted exclusive television rights are “Evermore” mind boggling (see what I did there, Taylor?) and moving only one direction — vertically, just like Patrick Mahomes’ salary.
Just take a look at the live sports cash scoreboard. NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox each pay more than $2 billion just for the NFL. Warner Bros. Discovery paid more than $1 billion for the NBA, and collectively traditional studios paid nearly $2 billion for Major League Baseball, and we’re not even talking yet about the billions for college football and soccer. Layer on top of that the fact that the Big Tech streamers want in on the live streaming game because they too have discovered its fervent fan magic. That hyper-competition now dials up those prices to 11, even as traditional media’s pockets get tighter.
Meanwhile, Big Tech’s pockets get brighter. Boasting multi-trillion dollar market caps — much of which was built on the backs of traditional media players (as I wrote last week in the context of TikTok and UMG’s ongoing dispute) — these ‘roided out Silicon Valley-programmed behemoths act like the Kansas City Chiefs playing one of the new United Football League teams (games of which will be telecast on traditional media’s outlets, by the way). The plays may be similar, but the ability to execute is entirely different.
That’s why Amazon could pay $1 billion for just one night of football each season (Thursday Night Football). YouTube paid $2.5 billion to steal NFL Sunday Ticket away from DirecTV, and Apple paid the same $2.5 billion for 10 years of exclusive live MLS soccer. Netflix is also testing the lives sports waters to expand its sports programming lineup, and these tech-fueled media goliaths ain’t done yet.
This very uneven live sports playing field demands a new kind of coaching. It’s kind of like the great gridiron movie “Rudy.” No one gave Rudy (traditional media) a chance against the Goliath forces he faced (Big Tech) in that story. So, what did our underdog do? “Rudy” (Disney, WBD, and Fox in our story) teamed up to create their live sports streaming joint venture. Think of it this way. It’s an entirely new kind of one-stop streaming stadium to host all of their collective live sports in the hopes of creating newly dedicated fans. In the immortal words of Shoeless Joe Jackson (yes, I know that’s a baseball reference), “if you build it, they will come.”
The question is whether fans of the new joint venture will stay though. It’s kind of like when my always-the-underdog Minnesota Vikings built their spectacular U.S. Bank stadium a few years back to ensure that the team’s fans would stay put in Minneapolis (there were rumblings at the time that the team would move elsewhere). The stadium is now widely considered to be the best of the best, easily beating out the venues of NFL royalty like the Kansas City Chiefs, and fans continue to flock, so far. But stadiums, no matter how shiny, must host a winning programming team. That hasn’t looked too great of late for the Vikings, but hey, one can only hope!
Of course, games are nothing without a referee, and we certainly have one here — the feds. Disney’s joint venture streaming trick play likely isn’t going over too well by live sports-focused streamer Fubo and other television focused primarily on live sports. The anti-trust referee will be asked to scrutinize the deal — analyzing it over and over on replay — and then make a decision that will be wildly applauded by some, but boisterously booed by others. Even if QB Iger called the right play, it’s up to the entire joint venture team to convince the ref that they followed all the rules here.
Hollywood’s new live sports joint venture is a surprisingly bold move designed to beat Big Tech at its own game. Now it’s time to really go big. The JV should staff its new streamer with the real pros who could take it to the promised land — young tech-savvy “money-ballers” who can develop entirely new fan experiences for the expensive live sports content it controls. Motivate them to come up with their own new trick plays. Here’s one: Put some generative AI tools in the hands of the audience at home to give them the ability, in real-time, to make their own personalized highlight reels.
That’s the kind of coach I’d bring in to run the new team.
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