• Loading stock data...
Thursday, June 5, 2025
opinion
Media

Where Is the Dang Game? Fragmentation Is Worse Than Ever

  • With leagues like the NFL parceling their games out to a growing list of networks and streamers, it’s become more of a headache to find the game you want.
  • Consumers and media execs are aware, and they’re trying to alleviate it—but things will get worse before they get better.
Bill Streicher/Imagn Images
Exclusive

Michelle Beadle on Losing SiriusXM Slot to Stephen A. Smith: ‘I Don’t Respect Him’

Smith will host a weekday show in Beadle's former spot, as well as a weekly show.
Read Now
June 4, 2025 |

Mark Phillip quit his job to start his company Are You Watching This?! in 2006 because, he says, “I hated waking up in the morning and learning there was a great game the night before that I didn’t know about, because it was on some random channel.” 

The company sells “real-time sports excitement data” and gambling widgets to customers like Fox Sports, USA Today, Hearst, VSiN, and DraftKings. In 2011, he also launched icantfindthegame.com, which tracks every live sports event being broadcast or streamed at every moment, tells you what channel it’s on, and adds a human rating of the current action (“Ok, good, hot, or epic”). Fourth quarter, game tied? Tune in right now.

The need for such a service is obvious: Sports fans are all suffering from the same headache these days, and it’s building up to a migraine. Where can I find the damn game? What additional service do I have to pay for? 

Take the NFL as the best example, though not the only offender: its games are on either NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC, or ESPN… or ESPN+ (one exclusive Monday Night Football game), Amazon Prime (Thursday Night Football), Peacock (two exclusive games last year, one this year), or Netflix (two Christmas Day games). Even coughing up for Sunday Ticket gets you only the 1 p.m. out-of-market games. You’ll still need at least three streaming subs to watch the games exclusive to streamers. Paying for cable (remember cable?) wouldn’t get you all the games. To get every game without cable would run you $788.

The latest sign that even the broadcasters involved in this morass feel your pain is that ESPN added a new feature to its mobile app and website called Where to Watch, and notably, it lists games on competitor networks. It had long been an unspoken practice, by ESPN and others, to avoid directing viewers to games not on Disney networks; that practice has officially ended now, sources tell me, and it’s specifically because live game fragmentation has gotten so bad. 

When Phillip saw the news about ESPN launching Where to Watch, “my stomach fell,” he says. But then he tried the product. “ESPN isn’t doing any curation. If you think about what Netflix would be without curation, it would just be a White Pages and you’d have to scroll through. You have to also curate for people.”

TV confusion is what led CBS Sports to create the oft-copied, occasionally automated “How to Watch” posts that include nothing other than a game’s time and channel. TV confusion is how the “What time does the Super Bowl start” SEO game got so big (and silly). 

The broader point is it shouldn’t be this hard to find the game you want. But it’s all happening because tech giants are crowding into the room when live sports rights are coming up for bidding. 

NBCUniversal Group chairman Mark Lazarus doesn’t sound scared, but he should be. Tech giants like Amazon and Netflix “don’t have the combined reach that we have with broadcast and streaming,” he told me onstage at our Front Office Sports Tuned In summit last month. My take: Having broadcast reach might not outweigh the dollars that the tech giants will soon dangle in front of big leagues. (The NBA already chose Amazon over longtime partner TNT.)

At that same summit, I was struck by the realization that all of our guest speakers—from ESPN, NBC, Scripps Sports, Roku, Teton Ridge, and YouTube—are in the same business these days: live television. Separating the networks from the tech companies, in the context of live sports rights, is almost beside the point. They’re all competing with one another for rights. 

Maybe YouTube is best-positioned of all, since, as the company is careful to caution, it’s merely a platform. Apart from its megadeal signed in 2022 to show NFL Sunday Ticket (which YouTube’s top sports exec Jon Cruz described more as an endpoint than the start of YouTube going after more rights), YouTube TV merely shows live programming from other providers in a conveniently curated pane. 

Major League Soccer took its primary package to Apple TV, so we’ve seen this shift begin. But in a future where an entire season of a major league is exclusive to Amazon or Netflix, you’ll need to leave YouTube and head to the walled gardens of other apps. The headache persists. 

This was the thinking behind Venu Sports, the sports-specific pay-TV app cooked up by the triumvirate of Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery. It was set to launch in time for this NFL season—until FuboTV sought and won a temporary injunction that stopped Venu from launching. Fubo argued it was anti-competitive that these mega broadcasters weren’t willing to license out just their sports channels to other TV apps, but were going to do it for their own joint venture. (A trial is set for a year from now.)

My guess is Venu won’t see the light of day, but it was a nice idea for sports fans: far more of the games in one place. What all sports fans want, of course, is a single, simple app (tell me the price, I’ll pay it!) that shows every single NFL game. Of course, that can never happen when the rights are parceled out to so many different companies that compete with one another. Or can it? 

Venu won’t be the last attempt by competitors to come together on one product that would wield huge pricing power. “The great rebundling will happen,” Phillip says. “People will be tired of dealing with all the splintering.”

Linkedin
Whatsapp
Copy Link
Link Copied
Link Copied

What to Read

Marc Lasry

Marc Lasry Still Wants to Buy an NWSL Team 

The billionaire tried, and failed, to buy two NWSL clubs last year.
exclusive

Michelle Beadle on Losing SiriusXM Slot to Stephen A. Smith: ‘I Don’t..

Smith will host a weekday show in Beadle’s former spot, as well as a weekly show.
Jun 4, 2025; Paris, FR; Coco Gauff of the United States celebrates winning her match against Madison Keys of the United States on day 11 at Roland Garros Stadium.

Coco Gauff Is Last Hope for U.S. to End French Open Drought

Gauff last made the French Open final in 2022.
Nov 3, 2024; Charlotte, North Carolina, USA; New Orleans Saints quarterback Derek Carr (4) walks off before a game against the Carolina Panthers at Bank of America Stadium.

Derek Carr Didn’t Want to ‘Just Take the Saints Money’

The retired quarterback walked away from a $30 million salary.

Featured Today

May 27, 2015; Paris, France; Mirjana Lucic-Baroni (CRO) knocks the clay off her shoe during her match against Simona Halep (ROU) on day four of the French Open at Roland Garros

Roland-Garros’s Iconic Red-Clay Surface Is a Precise Alchemy

The exact science behind maintaining the French Open’s red clay.
Alex Jensen introductory press conference on Monday, March 17, 2025.
June 3, 2025

Alex Jensen Started Utah Utes HC Job While Still Coaching the Mavs

How Jensen began building an NCAA program while patrolling the Dallas sideline.
May 31, 2025

PSG and the City of Paris Can Join European Soccer’s Elite

What a maiden Champions League title would mean for the French club.
May 30, 2025

How the Champions League Anthem Took on a Life of Its Own

The composer didn’t know he wrote a timeless hit three decades ago.

As TNT Sports Shifts, WBD Investors Reject $52M Zaslav Pay

Company shareholders reject the executive’s pay in a non-binding vote.
May 30, 2025

French Open Scheduling Sparks Backlash Over Women’s Time Slots

Coco Gauff has also said the French Open schedule could be improved.
hanson_smiling
May 30, 2025

Scott Hanson Agrees to Long-Term Deal for NFL RedZone

His contract expired after the 2024 season.
Sponsored

Game On: Portfolio Players Stories, Brought to You by E*TRADE from Morgan Stanley

In Episode 7 of Portfolio Players, go inside the boardroom with Avenue Capital CEO and former Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry on Giannis’s future, women’s sports, and upstart leagues like TGL and Unrivaled. 
May 30, 2025

Panthers-Oilers Rematch Could Be Big in Canada. Will U.S. Ratings Dip?

Likely viewership declines in the U.S. are countered by robust Canadian audiences.
May 28, 2025

NBA East Finals Delivers Strong TV Ratings, but West Is Struggling

The Pacers and Thunder are both up 3–1 in their conference finals series.
Around the Horn
May 23, 2025

Behind the Scenes of Around the Horn’s Final Days

FOS followed Tony Reali at the penultimate taping of the ESPN icon.
Around the Horn - October 26, 2020
May 23, 2025

‘Quirky, Nutty, Bombastic’: 10 ‘Around the Horn’ Faces on Their Top Moments

“A quirky, nutty, bombastic, mostly wrong, sometimes right, crazy sports family.”