Now that consumers can stream live sports of just about every description through one OTT service or another, the question is, can service providers draw enough viewers to make money on their big sports streaming bets?
Amid much publicity about the boom in sports streaming, the general absence of sports-specific ROI data can’t hide the fact that, by all indications, providers are a long way from generating the returns they’re looking for on huge licensing and infrastructure costs. Notwithstanding a wealth of vendor-supplied, audience-building solutions aimed at achieving that goal, live sports viewing is still predominantly experienced through legacy TV outlets.
That point was driven home in April by Dan Rayburn, streaming media analyst and producer of the annual NAB Show Streaming Summit, who noted that pay TV still accounts for around 85% of total live sports viewing hours in the U.S. Citing inflated numbers widely ascribed to recently streamed marquee productions, Rayburn said the impression that streaming services are drawing “tens of millions of viewers” is wrong.
“It’s not happening,” he said, adding, “I see almost nobody reporting the numbers correctly.”
With streamers spending $12.5 billion of the $64 billion global outlay for sports distribution rights in 2025 and likely to add another $1.7 billion this year, according to Ampere Analysis, it remains to be seen if the pursuit of better UX will deliver the payback platforms are looking for. Getting there starts with eliminating the hassles confronted by consumers in searching for specific events, suggested Sandeep Tiku, chief technology officer at global sports streaming giant DAZN, which, as reported by the Financial Times, finally hopes to turn a profit by year’s end.
Battling the Fragmentation Impact on UX
Joining Rayburn for a different session at the NAB Show Streaming Summit, Tiku took streamers to task for thinking the use of recommendation engines qualifies as personalization. “Personalization totally is a joke,” he said, with Rayburn voicing concurrence. “Open your app and keep scrolling to find what game to watch? That’s not personalization. That’s marketing buzz.”
Tiku suggested the granularity of the in-the-moment, per-user personalization providers need will require streaming via the new Delta protocol, which DAZN and multiple development partners plan to demonstrate at next month’s IBC in hopes of bringing it to market over the next two years. But there’s ample evidence that sports streamers are already moving toward significant improvements in personalization and UX in general by tapping into the outpouring of new vendor solutions now at hand.
One way to get over the fragmentation hump with a more search-friendly UX can be found among the many multiview platforms that have appeared over the last year or so. While multiviewing with three or four on-screen options has gained some currency, a spurt of newly introduced next-gen systems could bring streamers much closer to mitigating the fragmentation issue.
The platform Broadpeak introduced at April’s NAB Show is a case in point. As Broadpeak sees it, the key to getting the most from multiviewing lies with lifting limitations on the number of user choices, how those options are configured and how fast they are rendered, said Damien Sterkers, the company’s vice president of products and solutions marketing. In an interview, Sterkers said the new multiview platform meets these requirements with improved cost and streaming efficiency compared to other available options.
But as with any consumer-targeted multiviewing platform, there are matters of rights, market testing and other business complexities that must be dispensed with before Broadpeak can talk about customer implementations. “There’s huge interest, but it takes a lot of time,” Sterkers said.
That appears to be the case with most of the other next-gen systems just hitting the marketplace, including the widely varying approaches taken by AWS, Eluvio, Harmonic, Imagine Communications, MediaKind, Synamedia, Tiledmedia and Red5, all of which were also on display at NAB Show. To date, very few service provider implementations of these solutions have been publicized.
One exception involves AWS, which began its foray into multiviewing late last year with the development of Formula One’s F1 TV Premium platform, enabling in-sync displays of camera feeds from every car in a race. Still in development with general availability targeted for IBC in September, Prime Video used the AWS solution in last season’s NBA telecasts to give viewers instant access to all games in action at any given time, according to Greg Truax, director of live services at AWS Elemental.
Truax said his team has put a lot of work into developing a ready-to-deploy platform that can be customized to each provider’s specific needs. Given that implementations can be resource-intensive on the server side, he said, this can only be done at reasonable cost “with on-demand scaling in the cloud.” What matters is that, by packing multiple videos into a single bitstream, “you’re not burning batteries or using other extra resources like advanced chips on the client,” he added.
Innovations in Production
There’s also a lot happening on the production side to enliven live-streamed sports, as exemplified by the support industry operators are getting from Techex, the longtime U.K.-based broadcast production system integrator and solutions provider that is expanding its U.S. customer base. At NAB Show, Techex announced a partnership with Encompass Digital Media that integrates Encompass’ cloud-production workflow platform with Techex’s content transformation, user interface and control technologies.
As described by Techex product manager David Edwards, the partnership is focused on live sports and production convergence for traditional broadcast and streaming in the cloud, including hybrid operations involving both on-prem and public commodity processing centers. “What’s unique for Techex is we can insert content seamlessly in multiple live transport streams with the ability to scale operations in the cloud compute environment,” Edwards said, adding this is done with no need to decode the streams.
A big focus for customers has been enabling on-the-fly insertions of SCTE 35 (“Scutty”) markers and then ads on a regionally targeted basis whenever game breaks occur. The benefits and scalability of the Techex functionalities were on display in DAZN’s 2026 World Cup productions, he said, noting production for the championship game in New Jersey involved dealing with feeds from 50 cameras.
A UX Game-Changer Tied to Latency Reduction
On another front widely regarded as essential to a better sports streaming UX, industry players are moving aggressively to lower end-to-end distribution latencies. These initiatives have two goals: reducing streaming latencies to broadcast equivalency in the 6-to-8-second range (and sometimes lower) over conventional HLS and MPEG DASH streaming platforms, and achieving sub-500-millisecond latencies, commonly referred to as “real time,” over new streaming infrastructures.
As previously reported, the search for real-time streaming solutions shifted into high gear at the NAB Show with surging industry participation in testing and, in a few cases, commercial operations over new CDN infrastructure supporting the new MOQ Transport standard.
But there’s something more to MOQ beyond support for real-time streaming that may account for the surging industry involvement, and this could go beyond the latency question to address the larger challenge of how to drive ROI on live sports streaming.
As Broadpeak’s Sterkers noted: “MOQ gives us one single protocol for streaming all video applications. Imagine you have a streaming service where you can mix programs on the same transport platform, adding real time for watch parties or to bring in commentary from influencers, while maintaining broadcast-level latency with the core content.”
That’s possible because MOQ users will have independently managed dashboard control over each track of a MOQ stream. They can assign latencies ranging from sub-500 milliseconds to two-second “interactive live,” for applications like sports betting and interactive shopping, to 5-second “conservative live” matched to broadcast speeds.
Broadpeak is all in at this stage of MOQ experimentation, taking a highly flexible approach to its CDN infrastructure that will be productized as soon as one of its tire-kickers is ready to go public, Sterkers said. “It really depends on how much people want to spend on latency optimization,” he added. “But with MOQ they can do a lot more natively.”
Whatever the motivations might be, demand for MOQ support is high enough to persuade AWS it is worth a lot of the Elemental team’s time, AWS Elemental’s Truax said. Given that AWS has long supported streaming with the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), a fundamental component of the QUIC protocol used with MOQ, “we’re excited about the standardization of UDP video delivery,” he said.
With several customers already in MOQ beta testing, “it’s kind of a latency thing right now,” Truax added. But now that “all the pieces of the chain” are in play, aside from control over device playback, AWS has more expansive goals in mind.
“You will see us make a fairly big splash,” Truax predicted. But with the IETF hoping to complete the MOQ Transport specifications by year-end, getting to commercial operations is “going to take a lot of work all the way into December.”
