Field of streams

Last month, a Tennis Canada employee stepped to the microphone at a sports industry gathering in downtown Toronto and asked a collection of executives from Sportsnet, TSN, CBC and the streamer DAZN for advice on one of the most frustrating facts of life for fans. “How would you explain that one day [a sport] is on Amazon, the other day it’s on Netflix, the other day it’s on Sportsnet?” he said, during a panel discussion at the annual Primetime Sports and Entertainment Conference.

The staffer explained that he worked in corporate partnerships and some of the sponsors, as he put it, “don’t really understand the TV reality.” They’re not alone.

Over the past decade or so, the fantasies of sports fans have come true to an overwhelming extent: They now have access to a dizzying array of broadcast channels and streaming services pumping out an all-you-can-eat buffet of live sports, 24 hours a day, from basketball to hockey, cricket to kabaddi.

But even paradise, it turns out, has its limits. Fans are frustrated: By the multiplying number of services carrying the games they used to get in one place; by the challenges of tracking where particular matches are broadcast; by the technological hurdles of toggling between them; by the ever-rising costs.

What they may not grasp is that many of the sources of those frustrations are intentional features rather than bugs of the new landscape. The leagues scatter their games among various services to satisfy different and sometimes competing strategic objects. The services build obstacles into their platforms to keep viewers from straying. And as broadcasters and streamers have become more desperate to secure must-watch live programming, the leagues have extracted ever-higher rights fees, which are passed along to consumers.

Canada’s fractured sports streaming landscape has even die-hard fans feeling shut-out

For years, sports television earned impressive profits, its rising tide floating all boats: leagues, athletes and broadcasters.

As fans began to agitate – for more international sports such as European soccer, tennis and all-you-can-eat NFL games – new streaming services seized opportunities to disrupt the established players. But as the price of broadcast rights to live sports started to skyrocket and new streamers fragmented the landscape, profit margins began evaporating. Even as fans appreciated the convenience of the new offerings, they chafed at having to pay for multiple services to follow their favourite teams and the challenges of navigating an ever-more-confusing landscape.

Now, with their business models under threat, streamers are starting to formulate a vision of the future. And while it seems likely to reduce the current chaos, it might also alarm fans in its embrace of one of the most contentious elements of the past system: The content bundle.

To be sure, customer dissatisfaction has always been baked into sports broadcasting. In the summer of 1984, less than three months before TSN launched in Canada, the vice president of marketing for the new channel told The Globe and Mail that surveys indicated fans resented the idea of having to pay for something they had always gotten free.

To secure a license from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, TSN executives pledged their new channel would complement rather than compete against the traditional over-the-air broadcasters such as CBC and CTV, which carried the bulk of pro sports at the time.

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That wasn’t difficult, considering how little sports were actually on TV: In 1985, during the Toronto Blue Jays’ first race for the American League East pennant, CBC and CTV, which shared the team’s broadcast rights, together carried only about half of the 28 games down the September stretch. The other games simply didn’t air on TV.

After Sportsnet came on the scene, it, too, chose to stay away from direct competition with TSN and the other channels with national rights: In 2001, three years after launching, it focused on building its brand as a regional broadcaster by picking up the local rights to Vancouver Canucks, Edmonton Oilers, and Calgary Flames games.

Both broadcasters eventually put aside their gentlemanly restraint – most famously when Sportsnet plunked down $5.2-billion for 12 years’ worth of national NHL rights beginning in the fall of 2014 – and hoovered up the bulk of top-tier professional sports rights across the country. TSN and Sportsnet regularly placed first and second, respectively, in revenue among all English-language specialty channels. Their effective duopoly seemed unassailable.

Then along came a parade of global startup streamers with even deeper pockets and a conviction that there was big money to be made in disrupting the Canadian sports broadcasting landscape and the complacent incumbents who enjoyed the protection of government regulation.

DAZN, backed by Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard Blavatnik, arrived in 2017 with a mouth-watering offer: For $20 a month, Canadians could watch every NFL game, as well as some European soccer, tennis, and a smattering of other sports. A few years later, DAZN snatched the exclusive rights to the English Premier League away from TSN and Sportsnet.

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In 2022, the soccer-focused service Fubo, looking to establish itself as a serious player among Canadian fans, took those same EPL rights away from DAZN. OneSoccer, a Canadian startup, launched in 2019 to carry games of the new Canadian Premier League and matches of the Canadian men’s and women’s national soccer teams, then added a selection of international soccer leagues including, most recently, Germany’s Bundesliga.

Apple TV swooped in with a US$2.5-billion payment for 10 years’ worth of global rights to all Major League Soccer matches.

Other streamers were more selective, though similarly disruptive.

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Netflix bought global rights to World Wrestling Entertainment, which had been on Sportsnet in Canada, and added a handful of NFL games. Most recently, it also snatched up the 2027 and 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cup, bringing to an end decades of coverage by CBC and TSN.

Rather than buying up exclusive rights to a whole league, Amazon Prime’s executives have outlined a strategy of securing a meaningful but not dominant amount of the most important sports content in each country where the platform operates. In Britain, that means select soccer matches.

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In Canada, that led to Amazon last year taking Monday night national games from Rogers’ NHL package, forcing hockey fans to subscribe to another service if they wanted to see their favourite teams. A few months later, the company bought global rights to a chunk of NBA games, which begins to take effect in Canada next season. The league hasn’t yet announced how that might affect TSN and Sportsnet, which currently share Canadian rights to the league’s games with the NBA League Pass service.

For the leagues, scattering the rights among a variety of broadcasters and streamers allows them to pursue various goals at once. The NFL’s bread-and-butter platform in the United States is traditional broadcast channels, which still have the widest reach, but the league also uses weekly games on Prime to attract a younger audience that doesn’t watch much broadcast TV, and it sold a handful of games to Netflix for holidays such as Christmas because of that service’s ability to create global events that help market the league.

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In the NHL’s case, the games that Sportsnet airs on CBC, which is still the most widely available channel in Canada, help the league keep its reach broad; the games that play on the Sportsnet channel itself are monetized through subscriber fees and ads; and the games that air on Prime (which also brings in subscriber fees and ads) allow the league to experiment with different formats, such as a weekly whiparound show that brings viewers five hours of almost-live highlights from around the league.

In its first year carrying games on Monday night, Prime also increased the average amount of time viewers were tuned in – though fans may resent how that was achieved.

Last June, at the Canadian Gaming Summit, a gambling industry convention in Toronto, Christopher Walton, the head of sports streaming ad sales for Amazon Canada, boasted to a roomful of marketers about what he called Prime’s “stickiness.”

When viewers watch sports on traditional TV channels, he explained, they can easily flip to something else as soon as a commercial break begins. But streaming services such as Prime – as anyone who has struggled with a collection of mismatched TV remotes can attest – often take several clicks to change from, and several more to toggle back to.

“How often are you going to go in and say, ‘I’m watching the Leafs versus Tampa on Prime Video Monday Night Hockey,’ you go and log out during the commercial, go and load up Netflix, start a new stream, watch three seconds of the show, only to go back and exit out, reload Prime Video and go watch your hockey game again? That’s not a natural behaviour on a streaming service, so you see people sticking with that broadcast, watching the ads the entire time,” he said.

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Mr. Walton revealed that that built-in friction has been beneficial for the industry, if not for viewers. The average viewing time during the 2024-25 season of Prime’s Monday Night Hockey, he said, was 73 minutes, up 27 per cent from the 58 minutes on average of Sportsnet’s Monday night NHL broadcasts the previous season. “That’s because … they’re not changing the channels. So, people are watching your ads.”

He also noted that the average age of Prime Monday Night Hockey viewers was 43 years old, compared to the average age of 55 years old for Sportsnet’s previous Monday night hockey broadcasts.

Asked how dividing its rights helps the league achieve its strategic objectives, and whether it is concerned about the frustration experienced by its fans that stems from having to subscribe to multiple services, the NHL provided a statement from Jon Weinstein, its senior vice-president and chief communications officer:

“Through our media partners, fans have more access to more games than ever before. As the media landscape continues to evolve, we’re focused on creating the broadest exposure and promotion for the sport while meeting our fans on the platforms where they are and ensuring they have access to as much NHL content as they want.”

In a statement on behalf of the NBA, Matt Brabants, the league’s head of international content partnerships, said it “is committed to making live games accessible to fans in Canada on the devices and platforms they use most, which is why we have continued to prioritize making games available through both streaming services and broadcast television. In addition to hundreds of live NBA games available this season on two of the country’s largest broadcast networks in TSN and Sportsnet, fans in Canada can also access the majority of games through NBA League Pass.”

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Scott Moore, a former president of Sportsnet, said that recent Canadian sporting events, such as the Toronto Blue Jays’ thrilling World Series run, underscore the value of live sports rights.

“Sport has the ability to bring Canadians together around their TV sets like no other form of content,” he said. “We’ll see again and again during the course of a year. We’ll see it with the Olympics in February. We’ll see it with the Stanley Cup playoffs. The largest, most consistent live audiences on television are sports audiences. And what makes them even more valuable is they are an engaged audience, which is important to advertisers.”

“I do think there’s room for more.”

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Still, there are increasing signs that fans – and the system itself – are at a breaking point. In its annual Global Sports Survey last year, the Zurich-based media consultancy Altman Solon, echoing other reports, found that 66 per cent of fans “struggle to access their favourite sports” and 43 per cent of fans surveyed expressed some interest in sports “but are unwilling to pay” at the rates on offer.

Dvai Ghose, a Toronto-based telecom and media consultant, suggested there was reason for consumers to hope we might soon be passing peak sports TV chaos.

“It’s really become a very fragmented picture, but one which I think for financial reasons is not sustainable, in terms of the numbers of providers,” he said, noting that profits are shrinking as rights costs escalate. “The programming costs are ridiculously exorbitant.”

Two data points to illustrate: Rogers’ first 12-year deal with the NHL, signed in 2013, was for $5.2-billion; the 12-year renewal, signed last April, is valued at $11-billion: an increase of 112 per cent. The NBA’s new deal was for US$76-billion over 11 years, or US$6.9-billion per year; the previous deal, signed in 2014, was for US$24-billion over nine years, or US$2.67-billion per year, an increase of 156 per cent.

That kind of math is creating a profitability squeeze that is laid out starkly in figures filed with the CRTC, the federal broadcast regulator. Total revenue for the main Sportsnet service hit a record $707-million in 2024. But so did expenses: $692-million. Once depreciation and other factors were included, the channel suffered a pretax loss of $4.6-million, its first in decades. Its base of subscribers is also shrinking, dropping from 6.3 million to 5.3 million from 2020 to 2024, or almost 16 per cent.

Not all was lost at the operation: The Sportsnet One channel recorded a pretax profit of $48-million on revenue of $147-million, though subscribers to that service also fell more than 12 per cent from 2020 to 2024.

The same year, Bell Media’s TSN recorded a pretax profit of $66-million, its lowest since 2018. Its subscriber base fell even more than Sportsnet’s, dropping from 6.77 million to 5.49 million, or almost 19 per cent, from 2020 to 2024.

(The figures are for Sportsnet’s and TSN’s legacy TV operations, which are subject to regulatory transparency requirements that do not extend to their digital-only streaming services.)

The same dynamic is playing out on a global stage: DAZN, which launched in 2016 with the aspiration of becoming “the Netflix of sports,” has been a consistent money-loser: In October, the Financial Times reported that Mr. Blavatnik had pumped another US$587-million into the company, bringing his investment to more than US$7-billion in less than a decade.

Mr. Ghose noted that, over the summer, DAZN and Fubo – formerly intense competitors – had struck a deal to bundle their services together and to offer them on each other’s platform. “That essentially says there’s too much competition between these guys.”

Amazon also offers TSN and Sportsnet on its Prime platform, just as Prime has been available for years on cable TV services offered by both Rogers’ and Bell’s parent companies.

Mr. Moore said the industry “is crying out for what I call re-aggregation,” or bundling of services.

The original cable bundle, he noted, created “broad distribution to hardcore sports fans, casual sports fans and non-sports fans. You need to be able to recreate that bundle to be able to justify the rights fees that the leagues are currently seeking, and in many cases getting.”

“I would think that eventually Bell and Rogers will see the advantage of bundling their services together to become an uber-competitive streaming app. Because the Canadian broadcasters need to stop competing amongst themselves and realize that their biggest threat is the streaming ecosystem internationally.”