Examining The Fractured Sports Rights Conundrum, And What The Future Holds
Live sports are single-handedly keeping the decaying cable business alive. Without NBC, CBS, FOX, ESPN, TNT, ABC, TBS and a few others' willingness to plunk down billions for sports television rights, cable would have already joined Blockbuster (RIP), VHS tapes and CDs in the wasteland of obsolete forms of content. Every piece of content other than live sports and news has become fungible in the cable realm. Want to watch the latest episode of Succession ? Subscribe to HBO Max. What about Dancing with the Stars and Abbott Elementary , two network staples? Disney Plus and Hulu have you covered. Even niche networks such as AMC have their own streaming services at this point. Subscribe to enough platforms, and most popular movies are within reach. But sports and news carry far greater urgency. They operate on a much faster timeline than anything else. If scripted programming is on the slow drip, methodical pace of Better Call Saul , sports is like Brad Pitt's Bullet Train ; fast