For sports viewing and revenues, as with any other product, supply and demand do matter.
Huge demand will tend to find a supply, no matter how much the government tries to do about it, while falling demand will lead to changes in supply. And that might already be happening.
So it likely will be with the Federal Communications Commission’s inquiry into sports broadcasting rights.
No matter what regulatory tweaks the FCC might pursue in its ongoing sports broadcasting inquiry, live sports rights will remain extraordinarily valuable, at least in the short term.
But long term might be quite another story. Regional sports networks already are feeling the strain as a combination of cord cutting and a shift to streaming are threatening the market.
And global sports rights, though growing, are expected to slow.
A few categories seem better protected, though. Between 2014 and 2024, the top 10 sports properties increased their global media rights value 113 percent, from roughly $15 billion to $32 billion, while the rights of the next 20 properties grew from about $5 billion to $7 billion, or about 40 percent.
High-demand content (NFL, the Olympics, Super Bowl, FIFA World Cup, March Madness finals) might retain a premium. Other content might see less demand and value.
The problem is the long term. Short form social media increasingly seems favored by younger viewers, displacing viewership of “full games.”
Generation Z (roughly ages 10 to 28) is less likely to watch live games in full, and far more likely to consume sports through short, on-demand snippets.
A recent global survey found that just 31 percent of sports fans aged 18 to 24 watched live full-length matches, compared to 75 percent of fans aged 55 or older:
attention span is shorter (or consumers are accustomed to jumping between content bits)
digital platforms are preferred (on demand)
Personalization (one-size-fits-all does not resonate with a generation raised on algorithmically personalized content feeds)
Interactivity and viewing on mobile devices
Cultural relevance (Gen Z often enjoys creator-driven content that is more irreverent, fast-paced or tailored to internet culture).
Whether the FCC has much leeway to change matters is debatable. Even if the problem is fragmentation of the viewing experience, as well as higher costs, so long as demand exists, costs will climb.
U.S. football fans wanting to watch every National Football League game must currently spend between $935 and $1,500 annually for full NFL access across 10 services, for example.
That speaks to the demand. And that means distributors will continue to drive up the underlying costs of such premium content that ultimately get passed along to consumers, at least in the short term.
The FCC’s inquiry) is narrowly focused on fragmentation, consumer access to free over-the-air broadcasts, and whether current rights deals hinder local stations’ public-interest obligations.
It does not grant the agency authority to cap rights fees, rewrite league contracts, or dictate how much distributors (broadcast, cable, or streaming) are willing to pay.
The FCC cannot “fix this” because sports rights are determined in a competitive open market where leagues auction scarce live inventory to the highest bidders.
Live professional and major college sports have structural advantages that set them apart from almost any other programming:
scarcity and live appeal that make them one of the last reliable “water-cooler” events in a fragmented media landscape
premium demographics (affluent, hard-to-reach male viewers)
monopoly-like supply (leagues control their own content and can sell rights collectively.
Much public policy chatter is about theater and perception, so we should not be surprised when government officials say they want to “do something” about a problem.
But there is a “problem” sports team owners do face.
Every time a league sells a new exclusive window to a new platform, two things happen:
total rights revenue goes up
the number of fans who can actually watch goes down.
Up to this point, that tradeoff was tolerable because the revenue gains far outweighed the audience losses. But a problem remains: advertising revenues are built on audiences.
So, eventually, subscription and rights revenue gains are possibly balanced by losses of advertising revenue as audiences fragment.
If the assumption is that fans would follow the product wherever it went, paying whatever they had to, that theory now begins to be tested. FCC rules will not affect that new test of supply and demand.
Rights fees are not absorbed by networks; they are recovered through the consumer’s wallet in one form or another:
streaming and cable bundles
broadcast networks (advertising costs are passed along to consumers in product prices)
subscriptions or ad costs are still paid for by consumers.
The problem perhaps is not “older viewers” for whom watching their favorite team play is not discretionary. It is the younger viewers who never developed the habit who are the problem.
At what point might disinterest finally begin to prick the balloon of rights payments? If younger viewers are not interested in watching live sports, what happens to the business model?
