For the better part of four decades, the local sports ecosystem enjoyed a period of artificial economic tranquility. This era was defined by the "cable bundle," a structural masterstroke that effectively socialized the cost of premium sports content across a broad subscriber base.
In this model, every cable household contributed to the local team’s rights fees, regardless of whether they were die-hard fans or had never watched a single minute. This subsidization provided a robust financial safety net, creating a reliable and ever-growing revenue stream that insulated teams and broadcasters from the volatility of direct consumer demand.
We must acknowledge that this economic safety net has not merely frayed, it has vanished. The shift in local sports video economics is not a temporary fluctuation but a fundamental structural realignment.
Article continues belowEconomic 'Squeeze'
We have transitioned from a subsidized model to one where revenue is derived directly from the fans who are actively subscribing to and viewing the games, whether through linear tier packages or digital streaming platforms. In essence, the fan is now the primary, and often sole, underwriter of their favorite team’s media presence.
While this direct relationship between fan and content may seem philosophically pure, it has introduced a precarious economic "squeeze". In this narrowed revenue stream, the combined income from subscriptions and advertising must now bear the full weight of rights fees, production overhead, and delivery costs.
When the mathematical reality of these expenses exceeds the revenue generated by the active viewing audience, the entire system becomes inherently unstable. We are witnessing the limits of "onefer" monetization, a system where the value of local sports media is measured strictly through the lens of a single transaction, be it a monthly subscription fee or an ad impression—a challenge that is exacerbated by the size of a team’s local market and the competition from other teams for local fan attention.
To achieve long-term economic stability in this disrupted market, we must look beyond these traditional, singular pillars of monetization. Barring a massive downward change in rights fees and/or production costs (which seems unlikely given the premium nature of the live sports content), the entities acquiring local media rights must find expanded ways to monetize fan attention. Success in the modern era requires a "twofer" strategy.
A "twofer" is the ability to leverage the high-engagement power of live sports to drive a secondary, but highly lucrative, business value. We see this masterfully executed at the national level by Amazon, which utilizes sports not just as a content offering to support its subscription business, but as a potent catalyst to drive Prime memberships and expand Amazon’s share of the consumer’s wallet.
A 'Twofer'
In the local context, this logic applies with equal force. A "twofer" might manifest as a large over-the-air network using marquee local games to bolster viewership across its entire content portfolio, increasing the value of its total ad inventory.
And for the modern era, it involves a team-branded direct-to-consumer (D2C) platform that utilizes granular audience data, which had previously been inaccessible to the team’s business intelligence department, to drive the increased sale of in-person tickets to the team’s games, concessions, merchandise, and promotion of other events at the team venue, as well as the value of the team’s sponsorships, advertisements, and activations, creating a fan flywheel that grows the team’s value.
In this scenario, the cooperative stackup of multiple twofer platforms for the distribution of the live sports broadcast serves as both a product and a sophisticated top-of-funnel lead generation tool for the team’s physical business operations.
Entities that successfully create multiple revenue streams from each fan's attention possess a structural advantage over those limited to "onefer" paths. They can afford to experiment with new content formats, business models, and fan engagement strategies. Furthermore, they provide a more durable source of revenue to support that team’s local media rights and production costs.
And ultimately, they provide stability for fans, as the stability of the distribution of the game to the fan’s screen from year to year is not tied solely to the volatility of the onefer entity’s monthly churn rate or the direct revenue from ad impressions.
When markets undergo the level of disruption we are currently seeing in local sports media, the natural inclination is to seek immediate, short-term fixes. However, we must be disciplined enough to avoid "solutions" that merely perpetuate the instability caused by onefer business models. We cannot simply reconstruct the same onefer model and expect the same results. The math has changed.
The path forward requires an intellectual shift in how we value fan engagement. We must stop viewing the broadcast as the final destination of the revenue journey and start viewing it as the beginning. By embracing the "twofer" economy, we can move toward a sustainable future where local sports media rights are not just a financial burden to be managed, but a strategic asset that fuels the long-term health and value of the entire sports organization. Stability in local sports will not be found by looking backward at what we lost, but by looking forward at how we can diversify the value of the attention we earn.
