Report: Major Cable Sports Channels Losing Viewers; What Can Streamers Do to Lure Cord Cutters?

There was a time when live sports and pay TV were inseparable. The decline of cable and satellite in the United States has changed that relationship dramatically, and though studies indicate that people still prefer to watch live sports on linear TV, the preference gap between pay TV and streaming is shrinking.

That assertion is being confirmed once again by new data from Robert Seidman of Internet Compost. Seidman’s compilation of numbers from TV ratings magnate Nielsen indicates that many of the biggest nationally-offered sports networks in the United States have seen a decline in the number of households that have access to them since December. Networks like MLB Network and Tennis Channel, and even juggernauts like ESPN all saw declines in household penetration.

Carriage disputes, such as the departure of MLB Network from YouTube TV definitely play a part in these declines, but cord-cutting grew to such an extent in 2022 that non-pay-TV subscribers surpassed the number of pay-TV customers for the first time, and even sports cable networks that were once considered untouchable are now starting to lose viewers.

Despite the losses for cable networks, users are not flocking to subscription video streaming services to fill in the gaps in sports coverage. For evidence of this, one needs to look no further than “Thursday Night Football” on Prime Video. The 2022 season was the first in which Prime Video was the only national broadcaster of “TNF,” and Thursday games saw a decline in average viewers of 41% from 2021.

Customers are hesitant to embrace sports on streaming, generally. A survey from November found that only 8% of pay-TV customers said they would definitely cancel their service if their favorite sport went to a streaming-only format. So what can streamers do to overcome this hesitancy moving forward?

Adding more features will certainly help. Some streamers are already in the process of doing this; YouTube TV will give users a multiview feature when it begins offering NFL Sunday Ticket this fall, and Apple is reportedly looking to do likewise for its live sports offerings on MLS Season Pass and Apple TV+. Apple has also built up its content offerings around live games, with a live whip-around show and much more exclusive analysis of MLS games on MLS Season Pass.

But one of the reasons so many pay-TV users are likely hesitant to embrace sports as a streaming-only product is price. Because services like Netflix and Disney+ cost so much less than a cable subscription, users have become accustomed to thinking of streaming as a cheaper alternative to pay-TV. Sports-dedicated streaming services like Bally Sports+ or DAZN usually cost much more than the standard subscription video service, however, because of the high cost involved in securing sports broadcast rights.

That means that future sports streaming platforms will have to get creative to entice cord-cutters. That could mean offering users a special introductory price for an extended period of time. A hypothetical service that carried streaming rights to the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB could feasibly run between $50-$100 per month, but perhaps its owner could offer users $20 off per month for a year, or include a subscription video service for free for a limited time.

In the end, financial constraints are likely not the biggest obstacle streaming providers have to overcome when offering live sports. First, they’ll have to convince consumers that even though their product is not remarkably cheaper than cable, it’s worth spending their hard-earned dollars on.