Sports is the ultimate human drama, a respite from our increasingly technology-dominated lives. Except … it really isn’t. In fact, sports and technology have always been perfect together. Want to understand the bull case for ever-escalating media rights and franchise values? Advances in technology essentially and uniquely ungird the value of sports. The two are truly symbiotic.

Since turning the calendar to 2025, we’ve seen the debut of WWE … on Netflix, the heavily immersive TGL golf league, the Disney/FuboTV joint venture promising the first major event national sports streaming service … but not called Venu. Microsoft advertised its Copilot artificial intelligence service on, of course, virtual signage at the Oklahoma City-Cleveland NBA showdown, and Prime Video streamed its first NFL playoff game. Tech companies are committing billions of dollars to sports, raising the ante for legacy sports programmers, because as Casey Wasserman told Bill Simmons, sports is “not replicable.”

For more than a century, sports has provided an ideal petri dish to harness and promote usage of new tech. Live baseball drove proliferation of radios; Friday Night Fights were a reason to buy the first TVs. When we were young, instant replay revolutionized sports TV, color TV sets brought the action dynamically into living rooms and ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” spanned the globe for us “via satellite.” As professionals, the defining breakthrough was probably cable TV, which begat networks such as ESPN, billions in new rights money, and grew pay........

© Sports Business Journal