Many fans are frustrated by live sports being on streaming platforms. According to a Fox News Poll, 72% of fans believe that major sports events should be on free cable channels instead of premium streaming platforms.
Unfortunately, the fans’ desire is clashing with the changing live sports landscape, where many live events are switching to streaming services. This is alienating many fans, who are unhappy about issues like the high streaming costs and the fragmentation of sports broadcasts.
Fragmentation of live sports
One of the major issues facing many sports fans is the fragmentation of live sports. In recent years, major streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon, Peacock, and Prime Video have invested heavily in acquiring live sports.
Consequently, the increased investment has led to broadcast rights for major sports events being fragmented across multiple platforms.
A good example is the NFL 2026 season, where the broadcast rights are available across nearly 10 streaming services.
The fragmentation of live sports rights means that many fans have to maintain multiple streaming services to enjoy their favorite sport. Consequently, this has made accessing live sports, or even finding where some sports events are streaming, more complicated.
According to the Fox News Poll, 47% of sports fans have skipped watching sports events due to difficulty in finding or accessing them.
The findings from the poll are supported by a Casino Guru NFL survey, which found that 79% of fans skipped watching NFL games because they did not have access to or could not find where they were being streamed.
Skyrocketing sports streaming costs
Many sports fans are also frustrated by the rising cost of sports streaming. The addition of live sports packages is making streaming services more expensive.
Furthermore, the fragmentation of live sports rights means that fans have to pay for multiple platforms, leading to exorbitant costs. For example, fans will likely spend more than $1,000 to watch the 2026 NFL season.
The skyrocketing sports streaming costs are making it harder for many fans to watch their favorite games.
According to the Fox poll, 57 of fans have skipped a sporting event because it was too expensive. Likewise, the NFL survey conducted by Casino Guru found that 93% of fans believe the NFL is now too expensive to watch.
Some sports fans have a solution for the rising streaming costs: move sporting events from streaming paywalls and onto free broadcast channels.
However, this is unlikely to happen with more and more sports governing bodies selling broadcast rights to streaming platforms. Unfortunately, this could also create another problem, where some fans are driven to pirated sports platforms by high costs.