The way fans watch their favourite sports teams is changing constantly, with numerous options for fans to watch a game or see highlight-reel plays everyone is talking about.
In recent years, streaming services have joined the wave of showcasing live sports and events, but it's getting expensive for fans.
This wave started in April 2017, when Amazon’s Prime Video started hosting the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games. The deal between Amazon and the NFL was for $50 million for non-exclusive rights to host a regular season game once a week and it siphoned the broadcast from cable television in the U.S.
The growth of the Amazon-NFL partnership has grown to a point where this past weekend on Saturday, Amazon hosted its first-ever playoff game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Wild Card round. The platform also hosts NHL games.
Another example of streaming services starting to host live sporting events is at the beginning of this year, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and Netflix reached a deal for WWE's Monday Night Raw to be livestreamed on the streaming platform.
Vijay Setlur, a marketing instructor at Schulich School of Business at York University, said streaming services aren’t just the future of sports watching, it’s happening in the present.
“I wouldn’t say it’s the future, I would say it’s the present and the future,” Setlur said.
“We’re already seeing many sports leagues sign streaming deals with some of the top streaming companies, whether it's Amazon, Apple, or Netflix,” he said.
Setlur said one of the pros of these streaming services is the convenience, allowing people to watch from anywhere on any device.
“It’s convenient that it is accessible through multiple devices, whereas the regular broadcast network might not be accessible to stream,” Setlur said.
He said another pro is streaming services offer plenty of options other than sports for the casual viewer which helps bring in more subscribers.
“Being on the streaming services allows customers to discover content offered by the streaming service,” he said.
However, one of the drawbacks of streaming services streaming live sports is how many different services offer live sports, which means fans have to make a choice of buying multiple subscriptions or miss out on a couple of games.
Humber Broadcast Television and Videography student Jordan Fitzgerald said it’s hard to watch all the games because it’s difficult juggling the cost of numerous subscriptions at once.
“In order to watch every sports game, we need to have multiple subscriptions that can cost me over $100 per month,” Fitzgerald said.
Setlur said it’s hard for customers to save money because they have to subscribe to multiple streaming services in order to watch more sports games.
“Instead of saving money, which is what a lot of people did when they cut their cable TV, they actually have to subscribe to many services because their sports are spread out amongst multiple platforms,” Setlur said.
A standard Netflix subscription is $16.49 per month, a Prime Video subscription is $8.45 per month, and an Apple TV subscription is $12.99 per month.
The cost of these services pile up which can cost a lot of money to maintain all subscriptions.
