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Welcome back to The Varsity. I’m John Ourand, firmly ensconced in D.C. this
afternoon.
Okay, I admit it. I’ve become addicted to Nielsen’s monthly Gauge report, which reveals in hair-raising detail how fast the migration from linear TV to streaming is happening. For the third month in a row, streaming’s share of total TV viewership (47.3 percent) exceeded
broadcast and cable combined. The guys at Guggenheim estimate that “total TV viewership remained flat m/m, exhibiting historical seasonality” and that broadcast and cable declines were “partially offset by continued streaming growth,” according to new analysis they released this morning.
The biggest sports media story this week, of course, is Thursday’s launch of ESPN’s direct-to-consumer app and the Fox One streaming service. In tonight’s private email, Julia Alexander
has a must-read preview of what to expect. Reminder: Julia’s stories are only available to Puck’s Inner Circle members, so click here to upgrade. You won’t regret it.
Also, we released some extra Inner Circle tickets for our In the Arena sports media conference, which we’re hosting with
MoffettNathanson on October 16 in New York. You should act quickly on this, as our first tranche of tickets sold out in days, and these are being sold at preferred pricing.
Okay, take it away Julia… |
Last week, the NBA released an extremely heavy 2025-26 season schedule, including 247
national games, up about 44 percent from last year thanks to the league’s new 11-year rights deals with Disney, NBCU, and Amazon. Notably, over 100 of those national games will be streaming-exclusive, either on Prime Video or Peacock. So while it’s likely that the number of games on traditional linear is declining, the goal of making sports more accessible to all audiences without disappearing from linear entirely is becoming more clear. As John noted last week, it’s interesting
that, in this streaming-first era, so many recent rights deals have emphasized traditional linear partnerships. Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro liked Paramount for UFC mainly because it has CBS. Roger Goodell and Jimmy Pitaro came together on a deal for NFL Media. WWE’s Nick Khan struck a deal with ESPN. And, of course, the NBA’s Adam Silver is touting the importance of being on NBC and ABC to
anyone who will listen. |
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- Is all-access soccer worth $85 a month?: Everyone I talk to in the world of soccer tells me the same thing: There are very few global leagues that work stateside. There’s the English Premier League, which has seen its U.S. audience grow steadily over the past three seasons, per Nielsen, and whose rights fees have more than quintupled since 2013, per The New York Times. But other major international leagues, like Italy’s Serie A and Spain’s La Liga, have yet to catch on.
Nevertheless, Comcast is about to test the overall appeal of soccer in the U.S. with an Xfinity skinny bundle dubbed “World Soccer Ticket,” featuring a selection of 60 channels (plus Peacock!) that together will
provide access to over 1,500 matches annually, spanning every major soccer league, for $85 a month. That price point is on par with a YouTube TV subscription, where you get all the channels that hold rights to the big international soccer leagues, plus 100 or so others. That’s a tough comp. But the number of new U.S. soccer fans increased by 57 percent between 2023 and 2024, per
a report conducted by For Soccer, and effectively, Xfinity wants to make it more convenient for those fans who may be frustrated by streaming disaggregation. But is there an audience that will spend $85 a month for everything, or would they be satisfied with the less than $30 a month it would cost for Peacock and Paramount+,
which gets you access to the EPL and UEFA Champions League? “How obsessive are the biggest soccer fans in the United States,” is the question Comcast executives are asking. We’ll see: DirecTV has managed to mitigate subscriber losses thanks to its new skinny sports bundle options; maybe Comcast can do the same. - The NBA’s big Europe push: Amazon’s new 11-year deal with the NBA is high on my personal list of most anticipated experiments
in this new streaming-first, super global era. That’s because we’ll finally (hopefully) get some real data on the potential audience for a European league. Starting this fall, NBA fans in Europe and other regions will have a one-click, easy-access portal to NBA games via Prime Video. If enough viewers turn up, it could be an
important signal for the NBA’s future.
International expansion has been very much on the league’s mind. Aside from at this point very tentative plans for a separate European expansion league, the NBA also announced that it’s putting eight games this season into afternoon time slots on Saturdays to further encourage European audiences to watch via Prime Video, as they’ll air in various European countries’ primetime windows. Four of those games will feature the San Antonio Spurs and their
French superstar, Victor Wembanyama. With Prime Video available in 240 countries worldwide, and the capability to tie in merchandise sales directly, it’s easy to see why Silver’s team is leveraging the platform to test the market overseas. - NFL preseason heights: Congrats to Roger Goodell on scoring record-breaking numbers before the season even kicks off. The eight games that aired on NFL Network during
the league’s first week of preseason averaged 2.1 million viewers per, up 44 percent year over year, according to Front Office Sports. The games with the biggest audiences—Bears-Dolphins and, unsurprisingly, Browns-Panthers, which featured Shedeur Sanders’s first NFL snaps—were the two most-watched preseason
games on NFL Network since 2015. Even more impressive, viewership for the network’s morning show, Good Morning Football, was up 66 percent from the first week of preseason last year, while NFL GameDay Kickoff and NFL GameDay Final were up 83 percent and 68 percent, respectively.
So what’s going on? Is that all due to Sanders (and ever-hopeful Bears fans)? Did Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase taking the field for
the Bengals-Eagles game really have that much of an impact? Well, for one, NFL Network isn’t competing against the Summer Olympics like it was last August. And the league is likely benefitting from an underwhelming stretch for MLB, with some of the most popular teams delivering disappointing seasons (sympathies to fellow Yankees fans). But it’s also riding the updraft from more interest in rookie players, thanks to college football’s continued growth; fantasy drafts around the corner; the
Netflix sports doc effect, maybe; and… Taylor Swift. Or it could be that the most popular professional sport in the U.S. is just getting more popular. Even with a 2.2 percent decline in regular season viewership last season, the NFL still accounted for 72 of the top 100 broadcasts in the U.S., per Nielsen. I’ll be watching to see if this increased interest carries throughout the season.
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And now, for the main event… |
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As it prepares to launch its long-awaited streamer, ESPN is looking to combine every facet
of the fan experience—live games, news, fantasy, and sports betting—all in one app, the first step toward rebuilding its influence in an always-on, attention-shattered era. |
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One concept that sports media executives still struggle to wrap their heads around is that building TV
businesses on streaming, rather than cable, requires use cases beyond just watching games. After all, you need to give people a reason to subscribe and then stay on an app. On one end of the ambition spectrum is Fox Sports, which is launching its Fox One streamer primarily to capture so-called cord-nevers. On the other end is Netflix, which is integrating video games and experimenting with podcasts to hold people’s attention when they’re done bingeing.
And then there’s ESPN.
Jimmy Pitaro’s new streamer, which officially launches on Thursday, wants to do it all—capture casual fans, cord-nevers, lapsed cable subscribers, and sports obsessives for whom the games never really end—for $30 a month, or $300 a year. The economics will be daunting: Fifteen years ago, ESPN was in more than 100 million U.S. homes, practically printing money; now it’s in about 60 million homes. Monthly affiliate fees have gone up (to about $15 per subscriber) as cable
viewership has gone down, but the decline is irreversible. In May, for the first time ever, more people watched streaming services than traditional networks, according to Nielsen.
Of course, attracting younger users and then keeping them from drifting away to YouTube or TikTok is a new ballgame for ESPN. Less than 30 percent of Gen Z audiences watch sports live, compared to 47 percent of adults overall, according to a 2024 report from Digital Content Next. Sports piracy is on the rise.
And while ESPN knows a thing or two about programming that keeps fans tuned in between games (it practically invented the genre), it takes more than just great content to stand out in such a fractured media landscape. |
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While we won’t know the extent of Pitaro’s vision until Thursday, when the new app is unveiled, we do have a
sense of where ESPN is likely headed. Younger generations are watching sports less, but gravitating toward interactive content like sports betting and fantasy leagues that increase personal investment in their favorite teams and players. And Pitaro appears ready to respond with a suite of personalized features, including ticketing, merchandising, multiscreen viewing, ESPN Bet integration, statistical overlays, etcetera. The new ESPN, in other words, shouldn’t just provide streaming as a service.
It needs to become a lifestyle. It needs to be an app. |
Personalization & Second Screens
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Pitaro previewed as much last year at Columbia’s Sports Management Conference, when he said that
“the shoulder experience around the video will be much more interactive and it will be much more personalized.” What SportsCenter did for linear audiences—give them something to tune in to every day—is what the app needs to do for a post-linear audience.
One statistic that’s surely on Pitaro’s mind: More than 80 percent of people who watch TV on a traditional TV set do so while also engaged with a secondary device, like a phone or tablet, to text, scroll, post on social media,
play games, etcetera, according to research that tech firm Dizplai published in December. And close to 85 percent of Gen Z sports fans are on their phones while watching sports. ESPN’s saving grace is that those fans are often using the phone to participate in experiences related to the game. Ideally, then, there’s an opportunity to engage them twice.
Sports audiences don’t suffer from an attention deficit; they’re afflicted by attention hyperactivity. ESPN isn’t going to replace Reddit by building dedicated forums for every team, or create a social media platform to rival X. But it can easily integrate game-enhancing elements—betting, news, and fantasy—into a second-screen experience. A record 13 million-plus people signed up to play fantasy football on ESPN during the first week of the 2024-25 season, the company announced last September. Now, Pitaro needs them to become subscribers, too.
ESPN has plenty of levers to pull here. Beyond in-app ticketing and
merchandising, ESPN can also offer a far more tailored app—a personalized SportsCenter curating headlines and stories for individual subscribers, recaps of specific matches or events in hyper-specific leagues, fantasy roster updates, always-on analysis. The New York Times, which successfully expanded beyond news into a digital lifestyle product encompassing games, cooking, and product reviews, is the model that everyone in the industry wants to emulate. |
Perhaps the biggest challenge will be how to integrate sports betting into the new ESPN service, especially
as it becomes a larger component of the Disney+ bundle. Like fantasy, sports betting is growing each year as passive viewing gives way to something more participatory, interactive, and… dare we say, addictive. However widely accepted it’s become, gambling doesn’t quite fit into Bob Iger’s family-friendly portfolio (which will likely be a factor if Disney ever decides to put ESPN on the block or spin it out).
Gambling has always been big business, of course, and
as more states legalize sports betting, and more sports books streamline the transaction process, that business is only getting bigger. Americans spent an estimated $150 billion betting on sports in 2024, up 25 percent from 2023, according to the American Gaming Association. The NFL is the most bet-on league, accounting for up to 70 percent of sportsbooks’ annual handle. Thirty-nine percent of bettors are under 35, nearly 70 percent are male, and 44 percent earn more than $100,000 a year, per
Ipsos.
The sports-betting marketplace is already exceptionally crowded, but ESPN has an advantage here if it can nail the integration—clearly a priority considering Disney’s $2 billion deal with Penn, and the refocus on ESPN Bet. If Pitaro can establish the new streaming app as a place to both watch games and wager on them—giving subscribers a reason to stay engaged between time-outs and those interminable challenges—that creates more value for advertisers, too.
It’s also
a neat psychological hack to turn the ESPN app into a habit. As any media or tech executive will tell you, the key to a compelling app-based business is muscle memory. Think about when you’re standing in line at Starbucks and you go to open your phone: What do you click on? Instagram? TikTok? X? The New York Times? And how much of that decision is subconscious? Right now, millions of people are watching sports clips, gambling on games, and setting their fantasy lineups in a variety of
different apps. Combine them into one experience, built around live content, and ESPN has the potential to become more than just another streamer you regret paying for each month. (Even if you do regret most of those NFL prop bets.) |
Thanks Julia. See you all on Thursday,
John |
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Puck sports correspondent John Ourand and a rotating cast of industry insiders take you inside the executive suites and owners boxes where
the decisions that shape the entire sports business are made. You’ll hear interviews with players, network execs, and everyone in between. The Varsity is an extension of John’s private email for Puck by the same name. New episodes publish every Wednesday and Sunday. |
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Ace media reporter Dylan Byers brings readers into the C-suite as he chronicles the biggest stories in the industry: the future of cable
news in the streaming era, the transformation of legacy publishers, the tech giants remaking the market, and all the egos involved. |
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