Where Did the Game We All Watched Together, for Free, Go?

Fans hunting across channels and paying more — how fragmented rights reshaped the way we watch, all the way to the Milano Olympics

Mark Loftus has rooted for the New York Yankees since the days Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were smashing home runs. As a boy he followed his heroes on the team's local radio and TV, and occasionally a weekend network broadcast. It wasn't hard to find the game, and it cost nothing to tune in. It isn't so simple now.

Yankees games are scattered across the Fox broadcast network; basic cable such as TBS, FS1, ESPN and ESPN2; the premium YES network; and the Amazon Prime, Peacock, Apple TV+, MLB.TV and Gotham Sports apps. Apple TV+ has Friday baseball, Peacock has Sunday — the venue changes by the night. The one place Yankees games no longer regularly appear is a local broadcast station. The current setup, Loftus told the Wall Street Journal, is "not a win for the fans," accusing providers and leagues of a "let them eat cake" attitude.

The sentiment is widely shared. Games scatter across the week at odd hours — a Sunday baseball telecast starting at 8:30 a.m. Pacific, or a West Coast team's Big Ten road game at 9 a.m. The bigger grievance is cost. Stack a basic cable subscription, a premium sports tier, broadband and a few streaming services, and following one sport can run hundreds of dollars a month. NFL Sunday Ticket, which carries out-of-market Sunday afternoon games, starts at $240 a year and can top $500. Sports journalist Joon Lee calculated in the New York Times last year that a hardcore Boston fan spends $4,785 to follow a team — counting tickets, TV access and merchandise — a 262% jump over 20 years.

Weary fans walk away. Stacey De Salvo, an elementary-school teacher in California, watched his Los Angeles Dodgers for years on a regional sports network, but cut the cord in 2021 as prices rose and eventually, he says, "just lost interest." When the Dodgers made their World Series run last season, his passion returned — but he followed many games on the radio. Bill Sullivan, a Chicago-area mortgage executive, spends $252 a month on cable and calls that plenty. He doesn't blame owners and athletes for wanting to be paid, but says they "need to be protected from themselves and their own greed." The current landscape serves well-heeled superfans, he argues, while doing little to draw new ones.

The leagues push back. As cable declined, the NBA struck an 11-year deal with ABC and NBC in late 2024 that puts at least 75 regular-season games on broadcast TV — five times the prior contract. The NFL notes 87% of its regular-season games run on traditional broadcast networks, roughly the same share as in 2013, and its media-distribution chief calls the model "incredibly fan friendly," arguing the mix of packages has widened the audience. Some fans agree: Bill Moseley of Los Angeles says watching online compares favorably with the "crazy" cost of tickets.

But some of what's lost is harder to measure. Mark Pelesh, a retired attorney in Maryland, recalls how the Washington Redskins' glory years brought the region to a standstill every Sunday, a ritual that free local TV made possible and everyone shared, regardless of background or income. The TV landscape, he says, is stratifying like a stadium — "fans are getting sorted and separated by how much they can pay." As sports shifts from free and shared to paid and scattered, what erodes is not just the price but the common experience. Beneath the shift lie two forces: leagues slicing live rights into ever-pricier packages, and a generational change in how people watch at all.

The Money Behind the Fragmentation

What scattered the fans is money. Per S&P Global estimates cited in Variety Intelligence Platform's (VIP+) "Sports Rights" report, U.S. domestic sports media rights doubled from $14.64 billion in 2015 to nearly $30 billion before 2025, and are projected to reach $35 billion by 2027. Streamers spent about $10 billion in 2024 alone and have raised their sports outlays 257% since 2023. The more finely a league carves live rights among broadcasters and streamers, the more fees it collects. When Amazon streamed an NFL playoff game exclusively for the first time early last year, it revived fears that even the Super Bowl and World Series could someday move behind a paywall.

U.S. sports media rights market (Source: S&P Global / Variety VIP+)

Viewers Are Changing the Rules

As fundamental as fragmentation is the shift among viewers, especially the young. Per an Altman Solon survey in the VIP+ report, 71% of all fans name live sports as their favorite sports content — but that falls to 58% among Gen Z and Millennials. They find regular-season games boring and often see no reason to watch live until a game's closing stretch, preferring highlight packages. The trend is so pronounced in the NBA that owner Mark Cuban has floated charging for game highlights.

Why 18-24s choose highlights and clips over live sports (Source: Altman Solon / Variety VIP+)

Platforms split by age, too. Fans 18-34 use streaming for 60% of their video, and when live sports moves to streaming the audience skews younger — Amazon's "Thursday Night Football" viewers average seven years younger than on linear TV. Many watch on a "second screen," tracking stats, fantasy teams and social feeds; sports betting, now easy in most states, gives a Los Angeles fan a reason to care about a Detroit-Cleveland game; and video games deepen the tie, with two-thirds of NBA fans 18-34 playing "NBA 2K."

Women's Sports Raise the Stakes

The fastest-rising values are in women's sports. Per UCLA Anderson Center figures in the VIP+ report, the WNBA's roughly $2.2 billion deal with ESPN, NBC and Amazon is up 389% from the prior cycle. Women's March Madness — given the same branding as the men's tournament in 2021, after which ratings soared — commands roughly $65 million a year, about ten times its previous deal and up 471% in total. The NWSL leapt from $4.5 million to $240 million, and FIFA handed the 2027 and 2031 Women's World Cups to Netflix. Unlike golf and tennis, which hinge on a charismatic superstar, women's basketball has built leverage on stars it already has.

The surge in women's sports rights (Source: UCLA Anderson Center / Variety VIP+)

Streaming Swallows the Live Game — and Crosses Borders

Streaming is fast absorbing the live market. Netflix put $5 billion over ten years into WWE's "Raw" and added NFL Christmas games and the FIFA Women's World Cup; Amazon reset the market with an $18 billion, 10-year NBA deal; Apple holds MLB and MLS; and Saudi-backed DAZN took the Club World Cup. Digital also carries viewing across borders. Netflix's Christmas NFL telecast reached 218 countries, and World Series games drew more than 30 million global viewers apiece via the MLB app. In the U.S., the English Premier League streams on NBC and Peacock, the Bundesliga and LaLiga on ESPN+, and Serie A on Paramount+. In mobile-first India, major cricket matches have been streamed in vertical video, and esports has gone mainstream enough for a first Olympic Esports Games in Riyadh in 2027.

The Stories Around the Game Are Rising

As viewing habits change, the fastest-growing piece is not the game but the stories around it — the documentaries and reality series known as "shoulder" content. Per Luminate's 2025 Film & TV year-end report, nearly every unscripted subgenre fell year over year, from crime to travel, while sports was the lone pocket of growth.

Unscripted subgenres by year — sports grows as most others fall (Source: Luminate Film & TV, 2025)

That resilience stems from sports being one of the few subjects that still gathers mass audiences in a fractured culture. Wave Sports + Entertainment's Mack Sovereign, on Luminate's "In the Lab" podcast, called sports "a communal event" that draws even those not deeply into the game. The center of gravity has moved to streaming: in 2020-24, Netflix held the largest share of sports shoulder content at 26.6%, ahead of Prime Video (19.0%), Max (11.5%) and Peacock (10.3%). Just as Netflix's "Formula 1: Drive to Survive" grew F1's U.S. audience, the play is to pull unfamiliar viewers in through story first.

2020-24 sports shoulder content share, by streamer (Source: Luminate, 2025)

Korea's Mirror: JTBC's Olympic Monopoly

The collapse of free, shared viewing has played out in the extreme in Korea. Per domestic reporting, in 2019 JTBC — through the JoongAng Group affiliate Phoenix Sports — negotiated directly with the IOC for exclusive Korean rights to the Olympics from 2026 through 2032, and in 2024 added the 2026 and 2030 World Cups, at an estimated $500 million (about 700 billion won). Korea's terrestrial trio offered to buy in jointly; JTBC chose to go alone.

At the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Games, three rounds of resale talks with KBS, MBC and SBS collapsed, and the event ran only on JTBC and Naver — the first Olympics in Korea carried solely by pay media. Interest cooled so much that many viewers barely registered the Games were on. Ratings that had reached a combined 3% for the terrestrial networks at the 2024 Paris Games fell to roughly half that; the old "baseline 20%" had already broken at Paris. Snowboarder Choi Ga-on's halfpipe gold went unbroadcast live — bumped by short-track coverage — surfacing only as a caption, a delayed replay and clips. JTBC bought only an FHD/SDR feed, ruling out 4K, and Naver's monopoly on new-media rights kept clips off YouTube.

The fallout was severe. In April, JTBC reached a World Cup co-broadcast deal with KBS for 14 billion won, but talks with MBC and SBS failed. Saddled with losses from the failed Milano resale, JTBC defaulted on more than 20 billion won on June 12 and, on June 15, filed for court receivership alongside core JoongAng Group affiliates — 15 years after its 2011 launch. Korea's broadcasting regulator is preparing to revise the law on rights negotiations, warning that a single broadcaster's exclusive Olympic coverage may curb universal access, while the broadcasters' association has called for an expanded joint-negotiation "Korea Pool."

The Open Question

The shift from free and shared to paid and scattered is hard to reverse. Leagues and governing bodies sell live rights to the highest bidder, younger fans drift to highlights and mobile, and women's sports and streaming open new markets on top. Behind the dazzling rights figures, the question returns to Pelesh's words: how much of the shared experience of being fans — that sense of solidarity across income and background — can be preserved. The empty space left by Milano posed it most sharply.

Sources

· Fan interviews (Mark Loftus, Stacey De Salvo, Bill Sullivan, Bill Moseley, Mark Pelesh), fragmentation and cost, NBA/NFL broadcast availability: Paul Farhi, "Why the Golden Age of Sports TV Is Driving Fans Crazy," The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2026.

· Market size, viewer behavior, women's sports rights, streaming and globalization data: Variety Intelligence Platform (VIP+), "Sports Rights" Special Report, April 2025 (source data: S&P Global, Altman Solon, UCLA Anderson Center, Ampere Analysis, Luminate).

· Shoulder-content growth and Mack Sovereign interview: Andrew Wallenstein, "Sports 'Shoulder' Content Defies Unscripted TV Downturn," Luminate.

· JTBC Olympic/World Cup exclusivity and JoongAng Group receivership: Korean press (Kyunghyang Shinmun, Weekly Kyunghyang, Pressian, Newspim, Nocut News) and Wikipedia/Namuwiki summaries, 2019-2026.

Figures and quotations are reconstructed from primary materials; verify final figures against original sources before publication.