A sports fan instantly recognizes that this is a huge amount of sports programming, but not everything. There are sports on CBS and NBC that are not part of this package. Not included are some NFL football and the NCAA March Madness. There are some sports events currently streamed on Paramount+ and Peacock. But overall, this consortium of sports represents the majority of what sports fans want to watch.
In my opinion, this is going to bring about big changes in programming. Surveys have shown that a lot of households keep a traditional or online cable subscription in order to receive sports programming. That’s not hard for me to believe since I’m one of those people. I currently subscribe to Hulu Live just to get all of these sports channels in the list above. Anybody who has followed me over the years knows that I’m a big fan of the Maryland Terrapins, and I subscribe to online programming to watch Terrapin football, basketball, lacrosse, and baseball. I watch only a couple of non-sports channels and get my entertainment elsewhere than streaming services. I will be first in line to directly subscribe to the sports channels I want to watch. I also currently subscribe to football from the NFL, so I can suffer on Sundays while watching the Washington Football team.
I don’t think I’m unique, and I predict that there will be millions of subscribers that ditch traditional cable packages when a sports package is available. Even if people don’t fully ditch cable, they might downsize to smaller programming packages.
Traditional cable has been bleeding customers for years. In 2017, over 73% of U.S. households subscribed to traditional cable TV. At the end of the third quarter of 2023, penetration was down to 43%. Just in the third quarter of last year, the big cable and satellite companies lost almost 1.8 million cable customers.
A decent proportion of households who ditched traditional cable eventually bought a cable-like subscription online. But at the end of the third quarter of last year, the four largest TV alternatives – YouTube TV, Hulu Live, Sling TV, and FuboTV – had 13.4 million customers, only a fraction of the 32 million customers who have cut the cord.
It’s a no-brainer for me to drop Hulu Live in favor of sports-only programming. The price has to be significantly less expensive than Hulu Live, which recently was increased to $75.99 per month.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens to other sports programming after the creation of this new service. NFL football already offers a standalone subscription. March Madness is one of the most watched sporting events, but will people subscribe to an expensive package to watch games that only stretch over a few weeks? Perhaps CBS will stream all of the games on Paramount+. There are a lot of soccer fans who will continue to buy FuboTV.
I’ve been hoping for consolidated sports programming since online streaming first started. I have to imagine that I am not alone in this and that a lot of households will shift their spending due to this new option. I feel cheated today every time I pay a bill for programming and realize that much of my monthly bill is going to pay for content that I’ll never watch.
It will also be interesting to see if this starts a trend where programmers start bundling other similar programming. There are plenty of folks who would subscribe to subsets of programming that specialize in movies, children’s content, news, etc.
One thing is certain – this is going to shake up the programming environment.