WASHINGTON—National Association of Broadcasters President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt urged Congress to reform the Sports Broadcasting Act so that it “applies only to league-wide negotiations with media companies that will distribute games through broadcast television, not lock games behind streaming paywalls.”
The SBA, passed in 1961, gives the National Football League a limited antitrust exemption that allows it to negotiate TV rights deals with media companies on behalf of all of its teams.
In recent years, LeGeyt and others at a House subcommittee hearing argued, the NFL has pursued a policy of selling media rights to subscription streaming services that has enriched the league but harmed consumers.
“The Sports Broadcasting Act was built on a simple public-interest bargain,” he said in prepared testimony to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform and Antitrust. “Professional sports leagues received a limited antitrust exemption so they could pool and sell broadcast rights, and fans received broad public access to their games … For decades, that bargain worked. Fans could watch most games on free, local broadcast television. Leagues benefited from the unmatched reach of broadcasting.
“Yet today, it is increasingly apparent that the public access goals of that bargain are no longer being met,” he added. “Games from the four major professional leagues are now spread across Amazon Prime [Video], Netflix, YouTube TV and Apple TV. Fans increasingly need multiple paid subscriptions to watch their favorite teams, and survey after survey shows fans are confused and frustrated. Some estimates suggest that accessing every NFL game over the course of a season would cost a consumer well over $1,000. That’s a long way from the broad, free access Congress intended when it created the SBA.”
To remedy this, LeGeyt said: “NAB is not asking to eliminate the Sports Broadcasting Act. But this Committee should reaffirm that the SBA applies only to league-wide negotiations with media companies that will distribute games through broadcast television, not lock games behind streaming paywalls.”
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez also expressed serious concern about the way the NFL has sold media rights and handled its distribution strategy.
“The economics of how fans actually watch have shifted in ways that deserve serious attention,” she said. “What used to arrive through an antenna, available to anyone regardless of income, has increasingly migrated behind a growing stack of subscriptions and league-specific apps. For a family trying to follow their team through a full season, the cost of piecing together access across multiple platforms adds up quickly.”
Gomez also noted that the FCC is currently probing the state of sports rights on broadcasting.
“The FCC has a legitimate interest in helping gather information on how the Sports Broadcasting Act is functioning in a changing media environment, and I support efforts to ensure fans can access the games they love without paying a fortune,” she said. “When sports programming migrates behind paywalls, fans lose access, local broadcasters lose the revenue that keeps their stations alive, and the local journalism those stations produce loses the funding on which they depend.”
But she added that “I also want to be candid about where the FCC's authority ends. The Commission can gather information, raise concerns, and call out fouls where it sees them, but any meaningful update to the Sports Broadcasting Act will ultimately require legislative action.”
Also testifying was Jim Hallers, founder and managing partner of Tailgators Pub & Grill and Citizens Grill, a chain of sports bars in Texas, who blasted the NFL’s 2022 decision to sell the rights to the NFL Sunday Ticket out-of-market game package to YouTube. He said the general shift of sports rights to streaming has imposed significant costs on restaurants and bars.
“Because we promise customers every NFL game, we now have to figure out how to deliver multiple simultaneous streams across dozens of televisions,” he said. “One commercial video switch with enough inputs and outputs can cost in excess of $15,000. A full upgrade including equipment, wiring and the labor will cost $30,000 to $40,000 per restaurant. And then there is the bandwidth problem. It is one thing to stream a game at home. It is another thing to stream ten noon games at once while also running point-of-sale systems, credit card processing, security cameras, online ordering, music, office systems and customer Wi-Fi. When a game freezes during a key play, the customer does not blame the provider. They blame the restaurant.”
“Beginning with the 2026 season, EverPass is the commercial provider for NFL Sunday Ticket,“ he said. “But EverPass does not replace the rest of the programming my customers expect. I still need DirecTV, cable or another provider for the in-market football game, and all the other channels and programming that make a sports bar work. So instead of simplifying the business, the transition is adding another layer of cost and complexity. I cannot simply replace 40 DirecTV boxes in one venue with 40 streaming devices. It does not work like this. The internet capacity, hardware, control systems and reliability are not there yet.”
