Live Sports Key to Streamers As Bundles Show Huge Potential

Streaming’s great rebundling is showing accelerating traction with consumers, providing a key lesson for all programmers, including sports rights holders.

Newly released data from streaming subscription analytics firm Antenna showed that bundled services possess some of the strongest retention rates in the industry, and well in excess of comparable figures for individual streaming services. Topping the list last year was a cross-network offering combining Disney’s own Disney+ and Hulu with Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max, as 80% of subscribers who initially subscribed to the bundle retained the service after three months. 

Antenna also said that by the end of last year, 2.2 million people subscribed to that particular bundle, which includes a heightened level of sports between ESPN recently gaining a tile on Disney+ and WBD airing much of its live sports on Max.

That retention figure for the Disney-WBD initiative even topped industry behemoth Netflix—which disclosed it had more than 300 million subscribers in a recent earnings report. The company saw meaningful spikes in new subscribers after a Jake Paul–Mike Tyson fight in November and a Christmas Day NFL doubleheader, and is now looking heavily to live sports to further boost those numbers. 

A similar finding in Antenna’s data showed Apple TV+ garnered about 1.5 million sign-ups in 2024’s fourth quarter from Amazon Channels—with most of those incoming users never having tried the service previously. 

Bigger Trends 

The streaming bundling effort, which gained significant momentum last year, is a critical tool to reduce subscriber churn, a heightening concern across the business. Live sports figures to be a prominent element in that dynamic as streaming embraces more inter-company deals and continues to look more like traditional cable and satellite TV.

Regarding the early success of the Disney-Max streaming bundle, Antenna CEO and cofounder Jonathan Carson said, “We really think this is a wake-up call that these cross-company bundles could really be a game-changer and a solution for the industry.”

Both ESPN and Fox, however, currently have large-scale streaming initiatives underway that do not involve content from other networks. 

One prominent inter-company streaming bundle that failed to succeed, of course, was the aborted Venu Sports from ESPN, Fox, and WBD. That effort, however, grappled with extensive legal challenges, most notably from Fubo—which is now entering into a joint venture with ESPN parent company Disney.