Over the last year, it has become clear that live events are the key to streamers’ longevity.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, Netflix broke a record, with one of its Christmas Day NFL games drawing 27.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen data. The event marked the most-streamed NFL game in U.S. history.
In addition to the Minnesota Vikings-Detroit Lions game, Netflix also streamed the Dallas Cowboys-Washington Commanders game on Christmas Day, reaching an average audience of 19.9 million viewers. Another Christmas NFL game was livestreamed by Prime Video and averaged 21.1 million viewers, making it Amazon’s most-watched “Thursday Night Football” regular-season game ever.
Nielsen data for each game covered only U.S. viewership, but the Netflix NFL games were available worldwide. According to the streamer, people in more than 200 countries tuned in to at least one of the 2025 NFL games, with the Lions-Vikings matchup attracting an average-minute audience of 30.5 million viewers worldwide and the Cowboys-Commanders game reaching 22.4 million. According to Chris Hamilton, industry insights manager at global media and entertainment intelligence company Parrot Analytics, live events on streaming platforms are more important than ever.
Cultural Cache
“Streaming was originally built around deep on-demand libraries, but live events deliver something libraries cannot: simultaneous audiences and real-time cultural relevance,” Hamilton said.
“Netflix’s record-setting Christmas Day NFL streams were a clear signal that live programming is no longer a side strategy for streamers; it is becoming a core part of how major platforms drive engagement, monetize attention and strengthen their economics.”
Dan Rayburn, a streaming media expert and chairman of the NAB Show Streaming Summit, said that by the end of this year, streamers will increase their coverage of live NFL games as well as other live events.
Live events are turning streaming into a real-time, must-have habit — driving engagement, ads and retention in ways on-demand can’t. But soaring rights costs mean audience gains don’t always equal profits, raising the stakes on making the economics work. As giants battle to be essential, everyone else must win on niche, loyalty and identity.
He pointed to Apple and Formula 1 signing a five-year exclusive U.S. streaming deal last fall. The streamer reportedly pays Formula 1 approximately $150 million annually, making the deal worth $750 million. Apple also has streaming deals with MLB and Major League Soccer.
But while live sports are driving viewership on streamers, that doesn’t necessarily create a successful business.
Rayburn cited Peacock’s fourth-quarter operating loss of $552 million, compared with $372 million in 2025. The main cause for the loss was NBCUniversal’s 11-year, roughly $27.5 billion ($2.5 billion per year) NBA media rights deal, which began in the 2025–26 season.
No Loss Leader
“Peacock has a lot of sports. But look at how much money they lost in Q4,” Rayburn said. “Peacock is still unprofitable. They lost more than half a billion dollars in Q4. So it’s great you have a lot of sports, but if you are not profitable, does that matter?”
While live sports aren’t a magic economic fix for streamers, Hamilton said they help in three specific ways.
“They drive habitual usage, support premium advertising and make a platform feel essential in real time,” Hamilton said.
“In a business where reducing churn is just as important as adding new customers, that makes sports a powerful strategic asset. The rights fees are eye-watering, but for the biggest platforms, the retention and advertising math is increasingly justifying the investment.”
When it comes to streaming and AI, the technology is not being utilized as much as it is in other industries, such as film and television production. Streamers are using the technology for video compression and large language models for content discovery and personalization.
“AI is completely overblown when it comes to streaming,” Rayburn said.
“The place you see AI is in the video workflow. So if there is a three-hour sporting event, the moment the sporting event is over, you want to be able to chop up the highlights to only show the place where someone hit a home run. That’s where AI can look at that video, automatically clip it and create a video and package.
“Whether it’s ingestion, contribution or coding clipping, those are the places where AI tools will come into the video stack over time,” he added. “But right now, it’s still extremely early.”
Filling Niches
The consistent desire of Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon to appeal to the masses has enabled the growth of niche streaming platforms that serve specific audiences through genre-focused content.
But discovery and sustainability make it hard for niche streamers to sustain success.
“Long term, the strongest niche services will be the ones that either own a fandom so completely that subscribers see them as essential, or position themselves as the must-have specialist inside a larger aggregation ecosystem or bundle,” Hamilton said. “Just as importantly, they need to monetize community, not just content, through curation, identity, events, commerce and features that make the service feel like a hub for a passion and not just another video app.”
Two examples of successful niche platforms are Crunchyroll, a global anime brand and streaming service, and BritBox, owned by BBC Studios and focused on British television. Crunchyroll surpassed 17 million paid subscribers last year. BritBox boasts 4 million subscribers across the U.S., Canada, Australia and the Nordics.
Robert Schildhouse, the BBC Studios CEO of direct-to-consumer, has oversight of BritBox.
“We’re not trying to replicate the scale of general entertainment streamers,” Schildhouse said.
“Our ambition is to become a mainstream American brand but one that’s synonymous with a specific promise: the best of British television. In that sense, success looks less like mass- market dominance and more like being a trusted destination for premium content with deep audience loyalty.”
Like last year, there will be more subscription price hikes, more bundling offers and more streamer fatigue in 2026. What would make streaming in 2026 dramatically different from 2025 is if Paramount Global can close on its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Hamilton predicts that if a merger happens, “the total demand for content on that combined platform would roughly match Netflix. That would leave three services realistically competing to be the entertainment anchor for households — Netflix, Disney+/Hulu and a hypothetical HBO Max/Paramount+ combination.
“Everyone else would need to define their role more clearly, either as a specialist or as a service built around churn-and-return behavior rather than always-on subscription status,” he said.
© 2026 NAB
