Netflix and Sports
The streaming giant makes its long-awaited foray into live sports
Sports media is in a state of profound flux right now.
Old standbys are falling by the wayside. The New York Times shuttered its sports section earlier this year, turning things over to The Athletic, an organization that’s seen a fair bit of downsizing itself.
Sports Illustrated stopped being its proud former self years ago, cutting most of its staff and publishing once a month rather than once a week.
ESPN went through some high-profile layoffs, too. Now, its parent company Disney seeks a “strategic partner” to take on the busywork of making ESPN, y’know, profitable. Business stuff!
There are plenty of potential players there, from fellow media conglomerates like Comcast, sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings, and retailers like Fanatics. Or hey, why not the Saudis? They’re game.
And then there are the tech giants in the running, who’ve been especially active in the field of play lately.
Amazon’s in big, most notably with Thursday Night Football. Broadcasters like Fox and CBS walked away from that package, but Amazon’s done reasonably well with it (not that they’ve had much help from the schedule). Now they’re reportedly looking at a similar deal with the NBA.
Google’s dipped a toe in, buying NFL Sunday Ticket from DirecTV, hoping to pull more viewers into the world of YouTube TV. So far, so… fine.
Apple’s got a whole foot dipped in at this point, after cutting deals with both MLB and MLS. Longtime exec Eddy Cue described the rationale behind their play by calling sports “the greatest unscripted drama there is.”
All of these companies see the value. If you’re in streaming, a top priority is garnering an audience that is A.) big and B.) keeps coming back.
Sports are a safe bet on that front, particularly when it comes to the ol’ pigskin, as Sportico shows us below:
Let’s Do It Live
And that brings us to Netflix. They’re not a tech giant in the same stratosphere as the rest of the FAANG crowd (Is it MAANG now? MAANA? Has Nvidia replaced Netflix? MBAs, please advise), but they’re right around the 30th most valuable publicly traded company in America, outpacing both Disney and Comcast, for instance.
They’re the original streamer, enjoying a first-mover head start over all the far larger companies that later rallied their bannermen for the Streaming Wars.
And now, searching for ways to keep growing, House Sarandos is doing it live.
This week, they aired something called The Netflix Cup, which was… something!
Pro golfers and F1 drivers competed in what’s been described as a round on acid, whipping a golf cart between holes. It was fun, star-studded, and a total mess. But Marshawn Lynch was ripping heaters as an on-air correspondent, so there’s that.
Netflix is new at this, so we can cut them some slack, but things got sloppy long before Carlos Sainz fumbled the trophy, which, hold my beer Lando Norris, fittingly broke:
Nice.
Netflix has a ways to go on this front, but it’s an interesting signal of where the whole industry stands today.
For the most part, all these new players are just trying old stuff, swapping in for the legacy media brands that have long dominated the landscape. They have the money, and they want the eyeballs. Cool.
Even here, where Netflix is trying something new, it’s borrowing the format popularized by The Match five years ago, which notably started with Turner (under what’s now Warner Bros. Discovery), about as legacy as it gets.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s something clever about working to showcase athletes that Netflix viewers got to know in the company’s own docuseries.
Both Drive to Survive and Full Swing were big hits, and they’ve continued to model that success with Quarterback. Making athletes characters in a drama is something the NBA has done without trying for a long time now, and I consider that a smart direction to lean towards.
So do they, hence this ad:
Remember that Eddy Cue line earlier? Bringing some unscripted Bravo energy to the world of sports makes some sense, as Impersonal Foul will tell you.
Other streamers, like Disney’s Hulu, NBC’s Peacock and the aforementioned WBD’s Max, are already ahead on the live sports front. They either already have or will soon roll out higher-paid tiers that get you the live sports content in addition to their evergreen libraries.
All the newfangled apps on which my generation watches stuff on screens is fast becoming a bundled mess that reminds me of the way it was before.
Nothing that anyone’s trying is that new, which isn’t even an attack really. For the most part, live sports aren’t broken. There’s not that much to fix. We’re just changing out some of the parts.
Here’s another saying; not from Eddy Cue, but from my absolute boy, 19th-century French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, who told me this the other week.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” That’s a translation, but I hope I captured l’esprit of what he was saying. He kinda mumbled it.
Also, This
P.S. — how about getting The Sphere involved here, huh? After a lifetime of Knicks dejection, James Dolan is having a spherical moment. Something tells me that might not make up for the rest, but we mark a rare win for the MSG nepo baby.
Semi-P.S. — while those guys were messin’ around, the PGA Tour still does not have a final agreement with PIF, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. I’m not in those rooms, so I can’t speak to the rumors that the deal might be at risk, I just know Monahan seems pretty intent on telling everyone not to worry. Nothing to see here! Clock’s a-tickin’.
The Carolina Hurricanes are pulling out the old Hartford Whalers jerseys this season, a callback to the franchise’s first home. Nutmeggers may feel embattled over this one, but no one would dispute that the logo is fantastic. Don’t you see? The whale tail over the W forms an H! Negative space!
Alright, last and longest one. Last Sunday, I was sitting at a diner in upstate New York, and at 1:30pm, the one TV in the place had the Premiere League on. Manchester City was locked up with Chelsea, 4-4. Great game, don’t get me wrong.
But the fact that there wasn’t a popular uprising at not airing the NFL games in that slot tells me that maybe we were onto something with that whole, soccer’s finally made it in America thing. Oh, the times we’re living in. They’ll write about us someday. For now, you’re stuck with me.
