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Live Sports Are Fueling Streaming Growth, But Streamers Need an Off-Season Plan

Sports remain streaming’s strongest acquisition tool, but retention hinges on building smart post-game viewing funnels.

Here’s a blinding glimpse of the obvious: streaming audiences love sports! But the cost of sports rights has grown to untenable proportions. The amount of sports content across the five global streamers (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Paramount+, Disney+) has grown by 52 percent since January 2024, according to Nielsen. Across the industry, streamers will spend a bottom-line-busting $14.2 billion on sports in 2026, per Ampere Analysis. The NFL’s looming renegotiations will be so expensive that legacy media executives are already talking about “rebalancing” their portfolios (i.e., cutting spending elsewhere) to afford it. 

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As the streaming industry matures, these platforms desperately want to shift sports rights from loss leaders to money-makers. Raising subscription prices is a temporary band-aid. Long-term, streamers need to build content libraries that maximize retention well into the off-season to have any hope of recouping their investments. This brings us to an obvious yet complicated question: who are sports fans and what else do they like to watch? 

Given increased competition, price sensitivity and overall saturation, premium streamers are finding it harder to attract new subscribers in recent years. Despite this, sports remain a consistent draw for fresh sign-ups, similar to how Thin Mints are guaranteed to get my money when the Girl Scouts come knocking. 

The start of each NFL season continues to be kind for subscriber numbers at Paramount+ and Peacock. The recent migration of UFC to the former has also helped. Netflix’s mix of Christmas NFL games, weekly WWE programming and high-profile boxing matches is bringing new eyeballs on board. Apple TV has benefited more moderately from its collection of Friday Night Baseball, F1 and MLS rights. 

Netflix’s prize fight between Canelo Alvarez and Terence Crawford in September brought in 238,000 new subscribers, accounting for 15 percent of new sign-ups that month, per Antenna. Three of the top 10 Netflix titles in sign-ups that month were WWE events. Sports are so immensely valuable because they serve as the most effective on-ramp for new customers entering new streamers. 

Who are sports fans, and what else do they watch?

There are more than 145 million U.S. adult sports fans spanning nearly 90 million households, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights and Content Strategy. Within that large bucket, 68 percent of fans are male, while 32 percent are female. They still over-index with older audiences: Age 65+ (28 percent), 55-64 (17 percent), 45-54 (17 percent) are the three largest contingents. This suggests that the broad reach of broadcast TV still matters even as sports fans engage with streaming platforms. 

Sports fans are multi-streamers and are heavy users of digital media. They are 12 percent more likely than an average American adult to be Hulu subscribers, followed by Amazon (9 percent), YouTube (7 percent), Peacock (2 percent) and Paramount+ (2 percent). They also like podcasts, live TV, cable and streaming in general. But platforms need to keep these audiences on the paying hook well after their favorite teams or athletes are done playing.

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are leading by this measure. Seven of the top 10 titles viewers watched right after Canelo vs. Crawford were on Netflix, per Antenna. The other three were Thursday Night Football games on Amazon Prime. Among the non-sports options, the most popular co-viewed title was Happy Gilmore 2, as 20 percent of the fight’s audience also tuned into the Adam Sandler comedy. It was followed by Untamed (17 percent), Wednesday (16 percent), Madea’s Destination Wedding (11 percent), The Old Guard 2 (11 percent), KPop Demon Hunters (11 percent), and Squid Game (10 percent). 

Data from Streamline, which helps users find where and when to watch sports, film and TV, tells a similar story. The 10 narrative titles most added to the watchlists of sports fans over the last month include: Landman, The Pitt, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, His & Hers, The Rookie, Stranger Things, Shrinking, 1923, Paradise and Pluribus. (A friend of mine binged Season 5 of Hulu’s hockey comedy Shoresy after watching the U.S. Men’s Hockey team win Olympic gold!). 

Sports fans love other sports. That’s an obvious but costly programming strategy. Amazon is paying nearly $3 billion a year for the NFL and NBA alone, while Paramount pays more than $3 billion for the NFL and UFC. Elsewhere, mainstream genre-spanning hits (crime/thriller dramas, medical procedural, horror-comedy, sci-fi and fantasy, animation, dramedy) and broad-appeal movies scratch their itch. 

How streamers retain sports fans beyond game day

The years-long hype surrounding the sports docu-series genre does not match the viewership reality. But sports-doc viewer affinity can still help us understand the directional tastes of sports fans. Whip Media’s TV Time shows the user overlap of expressed viewership intent between titles—users who said they plan to watch title X also said they plan to watch title Y. 

For Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance, top overlaps by affinity include Quarterback, Untold, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, Hard Knocks, and Mr. McMahon.  Sports docs, behind-the-scenes series, sports-adjacent tell-alls and scripted dramatizations all belong to similar taste clusters. For Formula 1: Drive to Survive, the trend expands into Senna, The Grand Tour, Masters of the Air, Our Planet, and Tiger King, reflecting broader automotive fandom and premium scripted spectacle. Meanwhile, ESPN’s 30 for 30 pushes more into comedy and buzzy non-scripted programming like Tiger King, Veep, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Mythic Quest and the sports-centric Ballers. 

What did we learn? Sports fans respond to a mix of related scripted fare, relevant flashy originals and lean-back catalog programming. 

As more sports migrate to streaming, platforms should focus on building a chain of live sports programming; a sports-plus library that nudges viewers into adjacent content related to their favorite players, teams and leagues; and leverage mainstream scripted programming as bridges between major events. Come for UFC and Canelo vs. Crawford; stay for Wednesday and Landman. 

Sports remain the best acquisition drivers in these leaner sign-up times. But housing multiple sports in a single digital ecosystem is not the only final answer. Sports fans have predictable and programmable tastes and media habits. Grand-scheme ROI depends on designing the perfect post-game library funnel.

SEE ALSO: Why Ford’s Electric F-150 Never Took Off

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