Is Sports Streaming Priced for an Audience It Hasn't Built Yet?

Watch or Listen to the podcast with Ross Benes here

Nine out of ten minutes of sports watching still happens on traditional television. Not on Netflix. Not on Peacock. Not on the app you downloaded, forgot about, and paid for anyway. They're watching the same linear bundle everyone said was dying.

Ross Benes, Senior Analyst at eMarketer, put a number on the gap that most of the industry prefers not to discuss. On-demand streaming services account for roughly ten percent of time spent with sports. The remaining ninety percent — including the digital cable packages (YouTube TV, Fubo, etc.) that deliver the same linear channels fans have watched for decades — goes to traditional television.

"Streaming is what gets people's attention, and that's where the growth is," Benes told the State of Streaming podcast. "But it's not a lot of time spent."

That number undermines a lot of expensive decisions.

The sports streaming industry spent the last five years acquiring rights at record prices on the assumption that the audience was ready to follow. The NBA deal jumped from $2.7 billion to $6.9 billion. Rights fees climbed 121% in a decade. U.S. television revenue grew 24% over the same period. Streamers are selling a fraction of their available ad time at roughly a quarter of the CPM that linear commands. The gap between what leagues charge and what the ad market can actually support becoming structural versus traditionally having been cyclical.

"The rights have just increased at such an exorbitant rate," Benes said. "I felt that way for a little while now."

Fans feel the ceiling from the other side. Following one sport can cost a household as much as $1,500 a year. State of Streaming put that math on the federal record when we filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in March 2026 — comments the National Association of Broadcasters subsequently cited in its reply filing to dismantle the claim that paywall migration benefits fans. NFL games alone spread across 10 different services in 2025. Sixty-five percent of signups for streaming services carrying live NFL games cancel when the season ends. Cost, not content, now the primary driver of cancellation.

Did you miss a sign?

Pay the subscription. Find the app. Navigate to the game. The platform may not even tell you it's live.

Lucas Bertrand, Chief Executive Officer of Looper Insights, audits every platform a fan might use to find a game — smart TVs, games consoles, streaming devices, mobile apps. His firm found an average of 1.3 errors per sporting event: wrong start times, missing "live now" signals, wrong league logos, promotions that went live 40 minutes after kickoff.

"We've seen some massive sports rights holders who were pointing to a different league entirely," Bertrand told the State of Streaming podcast. "That's not good at all."

So 'Why Piracy'?

When the available options fail fans, they will find another way. 'Fan' is still short for 'fanatic' and so piracy rates in sports markets where fans struggle to find their games run as high as sixty percent. One illicit Super Bowl stream on Peacock alone reached more than 100,000 devices, according to ad tech auditing firm Adalytics — one stream among more than 100 redistribution sites carrying the same game. And those viewers don't show up in ratings. Undercounted ratings give rights holders ammunition to argue they're being underpaid. Rights fees go up. Fragmentation gets worse.

What's Happening

The National Association of Broadcasters cited State of Streaming's FCC filing in its April reply, placing our consumer access arguments inside the formal federal record — and the Justice Department has since opened an antitrust investigation into the NFL's exemption under the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, a carve-out written to protect a nascent league that no longer resembles the $228 billion entity it has become.

The sports streaming premium is real. The audience it's priced against has not fully arrived. Benes put it plainly: "Most people aren't predominantly watching live sports" on streaming. "The general population is still going to find those TV networks and watch that way."

Bertrand's diagnosis is the same from a different vantage point. "We are here to root for the consumer," he said. "Help them find what they want to watch, when they want to watch it, at the right business model."

Watch or listen to the podcast with Lucas Bertrand here