National NBA games have moved to streaming and will debut on Amazon Prime Video and Peacock starting this week. Apple is paying a reported $700 million for five-year U.S. TV/streaming rights to Formula 1 racing.
Indeed, with deep-pocketed streaming interests exploiting the audience-drawing power of live sports to further establish their reach, fans of the games are faced with a volatile programming grid that’s expanding in complexity, not consolidating into simplicity.
Hub Entertainment Research surveyed 3,802 U.S. sports fans ages 13-74 in June and July for its “2025 Evolution of Sports: What's the Score? Wave 4” study. And not surprisingly, the company’s findings validate that aforementioned premise. According to the survey, 65% of consumers agree that it’s a “hassle” to have to subscribe to more than one app to watch all or most of their preferred sport’s games in a season.
And 53% said finding sports they want to watch on television has gotten more confusing.
In addition, 63% say having games on separate apps makes it hard to check on other games that are on at the same time.
Nobody should trip here — the drawing power of live sports remains unchallenged. The consumers Hub polled indicated no willingness to stop putting up with this supposed hassle, with results conveying more an inclination to merely express it in business surveys.
Fully 72% of respondents said that it is “more important” to be able to watch sports content verses watching other types of content, or reading books or listening to podcasts.
Also undoubtedly reassuring to the Sports TV Industrial Complex: The importance of sports to viewers seems to growing, with 42% of survey respondents indicating they’ve subscribed to a streaming service to watch a specific sport, versus just 38% who said they did this when the same survey was conducted in 2024.
In other good news for streamers scooping up sports rights, 87% of those surveyed said they were likely to take on a new streaming subscription if it was needed to watch their favorite sport. That figure jumped to 92% for respondents under the age of 35.
“These findings prove once again that sports have unrivaled power to attract new viewers to a platform, and keep them engaged over time,” said Jon Giegengack, founder and principal at Hub Entertainment Research and one of the study authors, in a statement. “But it’s critical for services to remember that with great power comes great responsibility: the splintering of rights is making sports content harder to find. The backlash will come bigger and faster from sports fans than those looking for scripted TV.”