Special offers drive engagement
Peacock, Hulu + Live TV, YouTube, and ESPN+ were the most popular subscription services offering sports content in the U.S. after cable and satellite TV as of April 2023. While Peacock and ESPN+ have been essential to consumers watching games and events for several years, more and more large media companies recently jumped on the bandwagon and now provide live sports via their streaming services. Amazon, for example, made a deal containing exclusive rights for showing the Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime Video, valued at 13.2 billion U.S. dollars. Apple, on the other hand, spent over 2.5 billion U.S. dollars on a 10-year deal on exclusive rights to broadcast Major League Soccer (MLS) games on Apple TV+.Consumers can choose to pay for each single game or buy season tickets. The latter are in total much cheaper, and analyses found that this option drives subscriber growth of a certain service. For example, the number of MLS Season Pass sign-ups of Apple increased by over 200,000 between June and July 2023. Meanwhile, the share of NFL Sunday Ticket sign-ups of all new YouTube Primetime sign-ups jumped to 80 percent in September 2023, right at the start of the new NFL season. This demonstrates that sport leagues’ seasons and sporting events have a huge impact on the streaming viewership.