Live sports take the streaming wars into their next $8.5 billion arena

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The sports rights spending of subscription OTT services will increase by more than $3 billion this year to reach $8.5 billion worldwide, according to Ampere Analysis. Their monthly viewership will also grow, per our forecast, surpassing 2 billion for the first time in 2023.

Beyond the chart: Sports are an increasingly necessary—and increasingly frustrating—part of streaming platforms. The sports streaming landscape is fractured, meaning an NFL or MLB viewer would need several subscriptions to watch their team’s full slate of games online.

That also means ads are spread across multiple platforms. Until sports rights consolidate or OTT ads standardize, publishers risk targeting the same viewer multiple times with the same ad.

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