Cable reached 88% of Pacers country in 2010 and 30% now. Sport's old package is being sold off in slices.

The week the package came apart

For thirty years, most people did not choose how they got sport. It arrived inside something else - a cable subscription, or a licence fee, or a set of channels you could pick up with an aerial. You paid one price and the games came with it.

That arrangement is being dismantled in public, and this week you could watch it happen in four places at once.

The NBA is assembling a single streaming home for most of its local games, aiming at the 2027-28 season [1]. As many as 25 teams would be in it in year one, and up to 29 later [1]. The Toronto Raptors would sit outside it, tied up in a Canadian deal [1]. The reported price tag runs above a billion dollars, on top of a national television contract already worth close to seven billion dollars a year through 2035-36 [1]. YouTube is the favourite to host it; DAZN, a sports streaming app already working with ten NBA teams, is second [1].

The league is not doing this because streaming is fashionable. It is doing it because the local cable channels that used to carry a team’s games are collapsing [1]. The industry calls them regional sports networks. Main Street Sports Group is one of them, and a team left without a channel has nowhere to be seen [1]. The Indiana Pacers found their answer on Thursday: their games move to DAZN, chosen from about a dozen options [2]. Their commercial chief, Joey Graziano, gave the number that explains the whole week. In 2010, around 88% of homes in the Pacers’ region had paid television. Now it is around 30% [2].

Free is now a weapon, not a default

The odd thing is that everyone is also giving things away.

TNT Sports will put the first 30 minutes of every live Premier League broadcast on YouTube this season [4]. It starts with Manchester United’s trip to Hull. The pre-match show, Early Kick Off, is free for the first time [4]. Warner Bros Discovery’s Scott Young said the point was to “reach fans off-platform” [4]. The Pacers will stream 22 games plus four warm-ups free on the DAZN app, and 15 of those also go out on a local broadcast channel [2]. After that it is 59.99 dollars for an early-bird season pass, then 119.99 dollars a year [2]. The NBA moved 62 regular-season games to plain broadcast television last season, up from 24 the year before, and will show 71 this coming season [3]. The reason is arithmetic: NBC and ABC reach about 84 million American homes, against 62.2 million for paid television [3]. Advertisers followed - NBA in-game advertising hit a record 2.11 billion dollars, up 38% in a year [3].

So the giveaway and the paywall are the same move. Each piece of sport is being aimed at exactly the people who want that piece, at whatever they will pay for it.

Who was riding along

Which brings the bill to the things that were never bought on their own.

The Rugby League World Cup, held in Australia this autumn, will be shown in the UK only on subscription, through Premier Sports, after the BBC declined to bid [7]. The last tournament, in England in 2022, was on the BBC in full [7]. England’s men drew well over a million viewers a match, and more than 30 million people watched some part of it [7]. Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary and MP for Wigan, has asked the sport’s governing body to strike a deal putting at least England’s games back on free television [7].

Baller League, a six-a-side competition with celebrity managers, lost its Sky Sports slot this week and went online-only, to Twitch, YouTube and TikTok [5]. Its chief executive said Sky was “always framed as an add-on” [5]. He claims more than 90% of the audience already watches online, and points to about 12 million YouTube livestreams last season, up roughly a third [5]. That is a league that never needed the package. Others did: county cricket and swimming, once staples of British screens, have been squeezed to the margins as money concentrates on a handful of events [6].

Netflix and Disney+ show what “a handful” means. Both are buying football talk - Gary Neville’s shows on Disney+, Gary Lineker’s podcast on Netflix - and neither is buying a single live goal [6]. The right to show live games and highlights in the UK sits with Sky, TNT and the BBC, at a combined 1.67 billion pounds a year [6]. Documentaries and podcasts cost a fraction of that and keep subscribers just as well [6]. The BBC, which holds no live Premier League rights beyond radio, is launching four new football shows on its own YouTube channel [12].

The same sorting runs through college sport in the United States. The 2.8 billion dollar House settlement - the court deal that ended the ban on paying college players - lets universities pay athletes over 20 million dollars a year directly [15]. Most of that goes to football and basketball [15]. College programmes produce roughly three-quarters of America’s Summer Olympians [15]. Danette Leighton, who runs the Women’s Sports Foundation, is now asking donors to endow scholarships in gymnastics and men’s tennis [15]. A bill before the Senate would require protection and funding for Olympic and women’s sports [15]. In England’s Women’s Super League the split is already visible [14]. Arsenal and Chelsea together earned more in 2024-25 than the other clubs combined, and the division has lost over 111 million pounds since 2017 [14].

What the fan pays

The Athletic priced the same product across 42 markets. Singapore gets all 380 Premier League matches for about 23.55 pounds a month [8]. A fan in the UK pays over 50 pounds and still does not get every match [8]. Turkey pays 3.52 pounds; Iceland pays 87.77 [8]. In the United States, NBC is free with an aerial, its streaming service Peacock is 10.99 dollars a month, and a full pay-television package runs 85 to 125 dollars [9]. Even the NFL’s warm-up games are scattered [10]. Each team sells the right to show its own games locally. NFL+ costs 6 dollars a month for games outside your region; ESPN Unlimited costs 30 [10]. The Los Angeles Rams have gone to a new hub called Bzzr [10]. American college football is split across seven channels in one conference alone, with kick-off times released six to twelve days out [11].

None of this is a demand problem. NBA games averaged 1.78 million viewers last season, a seven-year high [3]. NFL games averaged 18.7 million, the most in 36 years [13]. The league says it still cannot tell how much of that is real and how much is Nielsen, the firm that counts television audiences, changing its method [13].

What we do not know

The NBA’s local plan is reported, not signed: the host platform, the number of teams and whether the games are exclusive are all still open [1]. The Rugby League World Cup could yet return to free television if a deal is struck [7]. And the NFL’s argument with Nielsen is a reminder that the measuring stick everyone uses is itself being rebuilt [13].