Behind the Numbers: TV and Streaming Trends for 2025—Netflix's Live Sports Push & Small/Mid-Sized Brands Spending More on CTV Ads

Audio by Marcus Johnson, Paul Verna, and Ross Benes | Jan 17, 2025

Ross Benes:

And there'll be international sports. Think about how cricket, like in the early days of Disney Plus was so crucial. There could be something that's not popular in the US necessarily that Netflix grabs and maybe it gives them a huge boost in South America or Asia, wherever the sport happens to be.

Marcus:

Hey gang, it's Friday, January 17th. Paul, Ross, and listeners, welcome to the Behind the Numbers show, an eMarketer podcast. I'm Marcus. So before we start, remember to write us a review if you have a few seconds. It means the world to us and it helps keep this podcast going. With that out the way, let's get to it. Today I'm joined by two folks. We start with our vice president of many things. He's based in the Pine Tree state. It's Paul Vernon.

Paul Vernon:

Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Marcus:

Hey fella. We're also joined by our senior analyst fighting out of the Empire State, Ross Benes.

Paul Vernon:

Hey Marcus.

Marcus:

Hey buddy. All right, today's fact, gents, that's where we begin.

How long did it take to build the great pyramids of Egypt? About as long as it seems to take any road works in the whole country to do just a small section of road, 20 years. There were some other estimates. I think it probably took longer than that. There were some estimates that said up to a 100, but this is according to History.com, pretty good source. So yeah, the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed as a tomb for the Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu, estimates placed a completion sometime around 2560 BC or 2540, and it took about two decades apparently. And Elizabeth Nix writes that it covers an area of 13 acres. The monument was designed to align with the points of the compass and built with an estimated 2.3 million stones each weighing a ton or more on average, which makes no sense how they moved these.

Ross Benes:

They had no unions back then. They moved quicker.

Paul Vernon:

Yeah, I mean today with giant cranes and forklifts, it would probably take longer than 20 years to do this.

Marcus:

Yeah.

Paul Vernon:

So I can't imagine. But I know it was actually, for those keeping track, it was 2557 BC and I remember it very clearly.

Marcus:

Paul's the one who was trying to start all of those unions, yes.

Paul Vernon:

I'll say also that we know Rome wasn't built in a day. Definitely neither were any of these pyramids.

Marcus:

Yeah, apparently not. It's a heck of a project. Because there are more. There are three on this site. So Khufu's pyramid, two are the large pyramids for Pharaohs built on the same site, one for his son Khafre and the other for Khafre's son, Menkaure. Khafre's pyramid is home to the famous Great Sphinx statue, over 250 feet long, 66 feet high. Remarkable.

Anyway, today's real topic, the Great Behind the Numbers Takeoff, TV and streaming trends and predictions for 2025.

All right, this is the Great Behind the Numbers Takeoff, TV and streaming trends and predictions for this year. It's Great British Bake Off style for today's episodes in which our takers, bakers, will be cooking up one trend each for you. Three rounds. Signature take, the how it will technically play out challenge, and the show stopping arguments. Let's meet the contestants predictions. So Ross, and then Paul, in a sentence, what are you going to be baking for us today? Ross, you go first.

Ross Benes:

What I'm baking is that the share of streaming ad revenues coming from small companies will grow.

Marcus:

Okay. And Paul, what do you have for us?

Paul Vernon:

I have that Netflix's big splash with the NFL Christmas Day broadcast signals a new normal in sports video licensing.

Marcus:

All right, let's get into round one,. Signature take. Our chefs will have about a minute to explain the premise of their trends. So Ross, you mentioned that for yours, you're saying that share of CTV ad spending from small and mid-size advertisers going to expand. Expand on that for us a little bit.

Ross Benes:

Well, you've seen it in a few different announcements with Roku and Disney and Comcast where they've made it easier for advertisers to have a self-server option to buy their inventory. And basically they're going after more small and mid-market advertisers because you get tapped out if you're only going after big brands. Big brands are the early adopters, especially when there's a scarce inventory of this area. But to really grow the revenue for their streaming platforms, they're going to have to embrace more small advertisers, which is what these digital services like YouTube and Facebook have been doing for a long time. You're going to see more YouTube application of streaming.

Marcus:

Okay. And when you say the scales amounts of power is going to shift, are we talking from 90/10 to 50/50?

Ross Benes:

It's tough to put a share on it. I think-

Marcus:

A little bit or a lot?

Ross Benes:

It's going to be a sizable minority coming from this.

Marcus:

Okay.

Ross Benes:

I think most spend is still going to come from your large nationally known brands for most CTV services, because they just don't have as much inventory, but the share going to those small ones is going to keep growing and maybe eventually become the majority. Probably not this year though.

Marcus:

Okay. Paul, your signature take. What you got for us.

Paul Vernon:

Yeah, I think with Netflix really jumping into the fray of live sports, it's certainly a big change for them. If you recall, Netflix had famously sworn off advertising and we know how that turned out. And they had done something very similar with live sports where they said they just weren't interested.

So then this year we have the Mike Tyson, Jake Paul mega event, and now we have these Christmas Day broadcasts and the announcement late in the year that Netflix was licensing the next two, or signed an exclusive license worldwide to stream the next two FIFA Women's World Cups. So I think these are big events and it basically means that tech is now firmly a really big player in sports licensing. We had seen this coming on with Amazon and Apple TV, but I think Netflix with it's how many, over, close to 760 million viewers worldwide by the end of this year, that those are big numbers. And keep in mind that with all of these tech companies, most of the deals are either global or these companies have deals in many different regions, which is quite different from the legacy media companies in the US that are licensing the bulk of the big league sports rights still to this day.

Marcus:

When you stop and zoom out, you do notice that Netflix has conducted a fairly thorough level of experimentation when it comes to streaming live sports, right? I mean you mentioned a bunch of them, but if you go all the way back to, I don't know if it was the beginning of last year or the year before that at this point, but they had golf tournaments, tennis tournaments. As you mentioned they had the boxing match, the two NFL games. They've got rights to the women's football World Cup coming up. They now they've got WWE Raw, wrestling, which just left traditional TV for a weekly slot on Netflix from January 6th. And that's a big deal as well. Some folks might not watch wrestling the way that our colleague and friend Ross Benes does, but Jason Aten of Inc. was noting it's the longest running weekly episodic series on TV. Talk to me.

Ross Benes:

There's a little bit of kayfabe in that statement. Kayfabe is the pro wrestling term to suspend disbelief for the purpose of telling a story, like basically believe in fakery because you want to so buy into the performance art. WWE says that, they say a lot of things that aren't true about their product, which I guess what do you expect? They're a professional wrestling company. But there are other TV shows with longer, like Meet the Press has been on with weekly episodic additions for much longer than Raw has been. WWE does state what you're saying, but it's not true.

Marcus:

Is it because they've not been, because they started in 1993-

Ross Benes:

It's because they say whatever they want. They say all sorts of things about their past that isn't true. About ratings that they never had. They inflate the gate for WrestleMania III that Hulk Hogan beat Andre the Giant. If WWE is saying it, that doesn't mean it's true.

Marcus:

Okay, so they started then, and-

Ross Benes:

Just go look at Meet the Press and when that show started, how many episodes it had compared to Raw. And there's others too.

Marcus:

Okay. But I mean it's one of, right? It's been on for a very long time.

Ross Benes:

Oh yeah, yeah. It's been on for a very long time.

Marcus:

Celebrating it's 32nd birthday.

Ross Benes:

For sure.

Marcus:

And the audience too is pretty significant. I mean, their final episodes on its previous home USA Network, averaging 1.6 million viewers according to Nielsen. And that went up against Monday Night Football, which is a huge competitor.

Ross Benes:

And that's just domestically.

Marcus:

Yes.

Ross Benes:

They've expanded internationally a lot. But they were getting more like 8 million homes, or six to 8 million homes in the late '90s, but wrestling overall was a lot more popular then. So it's actually less popular than it used to be in the US, but probably more popular globally.

Marcus:

Yeah. All right, let's tuck into these two a bit more in round two, the how it will technically play out challenge. Our chefs will explain in a bit more detail how they expect the trends to manifest. Ross, let's go back to yours. How do you see this unfolding throughout the next couple of months or year?

Ross Benes:

Well, more focus from the streaming services on self-serve, more focus on programmatic, just trying to get into new advertiser categories that they necessarily haven't been into. This is probably going to lead into your next part, but as that unfolds, you will have some challenges. A big part of it is that a small and mid-sized company won't have the ability to spend on creative like a big company. If you're going for a small auto dealer that's just in your region, they're not going to make an ad that looks like the national Toyota ad that's on Monday night Football. So you're going to see some cheaper creative as more performance and more small advertisers are crowding the market.

Marcus:

Cheaper creative, but I guess more creative using AI. And that could help level the playing field?

Ross Benes:

That probably will come in, especially if you're a really low level, like if you're a really low budget and you don't have the capability to have a creative director for this ad. Yeah, for sure, AI could be part of that. And look a lot like social ads.

Marcus:

Yeah. There was an interesting trend from Dani Benowitz, Global and US President of Magna. He had three predictions for 2025, but one of them I wanted to bring up here is that they think that there will be more than three entirely AI generated ads in the Super Bowl.

Ross Benes:

Oh wow. This Super Bowl, the one that's coming in a month?

Marcus:

Yep, the one played in 2025, yeah, the one that will likely feature the Chiefs. Let's be real. Paul, what do you make of this trend from Ross? Any thoughts?

Paul Vernon:

Yeah, I mean I think definitely there's a bifurcation in terms of the size of these players and what they're going to be capable of doing. But I think if you think about from the platform's perspective, you've got huge incumbents and then you've got companies that have not really been as active, like Roku for example, getting more into live sports with things like X Games. It's really just a much more unpredictable landscape because it used to be that the platforms that were most involved in sports were the ones that had the big budgets and the combination of legacy media and streaming media. But now you've got these tech players and you have these sort of device companies and it's just very different now. And I think it actually gives more opportunities for lesser known sports, more niche sports, to find a place in the ecosystem.

Marcus:

Yeah. All right, Paul, we go back to your trend for round two, how it will play out. I mean, one question I had is are these working? And it depends on what you define as working. The Jake Paul-Tyson fight drew a record breaking audience and also apparently pulled in 1.4 million new subscriptions to Netflix, according to Antenna Data, that's a research company. If you look at the Christmas NFL game audience, peaked at 27 million. That's around half of the Tyson Paul fight, but that's about a quarter of what the Super Bowl pulls in. So you could look at it as, "Oh, it's only a quarter." 27 million people for an audience, it is pretty impressive. So that's what they've achieved at the end of last year. How do you see this trend playing out in Netflix moving more into sports this year?

Paul Vernon:

Yeah, I mean for starters, I think when it comes to those metrics, I am also skeptical. I mean, Ross was talking about WWE and the stats they share. I think anything that is self-reported by Netflix, I'm not disputing the numbers, but I think that they can afford to be selective in what data they share.

Marcus:

Fair.

Paul Vernon:

So we don't really know how it's driving their business because there's a lot more that happens kind of behind in a black box. But clearly whatever the actual number is, it's a big number and I think I would definitely consider all of Netflix's recent experiments to be successful. And I think what it looks like going forward is just building on that. They had a few technical issues. I think they're going to need to work those out. But I think that one of the big factors here is the global one, is that this doesn't just reach a very big audience, but it expands the audience for these sports properties really to the whole world, and there's a lot to be said for that because then you can build on those pockets of interest and optimize them. So it's really like a different thing than if ESPN or NBC Sports is carrying a stream or a broadcast within the US or a certain geography. So this is just a lot bigger than that.

Marcus:

Yeah. Ross, any thoughts on Netflix moving more in to sports, what they've done, what you expect them to do? There's the Fubo deal as well, which is interesting because obviously they're a sports streaming service and they've decided to partner with Disney. What's your take here?

Ross Benes:

Well, so they've done a lot of these experiments and at some point if they're going well, like they seem to be going, you want to graduate from doing experiments to having something consistent. So they do have the WWE program, and to Paul's point, because it was pushed out globally and Netflix has so many subscribers, the viewership for that, at least in the first episode, is quite a bit higher than what the viewership was on USA Network throughout the year. But what I expect Netflix at some point to do is to not just have the one-off golf tournament or the one-off NFL game, to have consistent rights for a season of a sport. Now some of the big sports are pretty locked up.

Marcus:

I was going to say, is there anything left?

Paul Vernon:

Yeah. UFC.

Ross Benes:

Yeah, UFC would be interesting.

Paul Vernon:

UFC, that's coming up this year and that would actually be exactly what Ross is describing. And I totally agree. And I think the reason I singled this out as a trend is Netflix has been late to this game, frankly, but if you look at what Amazon did where at first it was very experimental, they actually took over the NFL deal from Twitter and it was not exclusive. So they've shifted from that to really just going full on, particularly with the NFL, but now also with the NBA and a lot of other sports. Amazon has also done a very good job of licensing, especially World International Soccer in certain geographies where they're getting a lot of value out of that. But I think with Netflix, they will definitely have to pick out something that's big because yes, most of the major rights are locked up for ten year contracts and many of them have been renewed in the past couple of years, so there's not a lot of inventory available. But I think the UFC could be one where they swoop in. I'm sure they're going to have a lot of competition.

Ross Benes:

And there'll be international sports.

Marcus:

Yeah.

Ross Benes:

Think about how cricket in the early days of Disney Plus was so crucial.

Paul Vernon:

Yeah.

Ross Benes:

There could be something that's not popular in the U.S necessarily that Netflix grabs and maybe it gives them a huge boost in South America or Asia, wherever the sport happens to be.

Marcus:

Yeah.

Paul Vernon:

Also college.

Marcus:

Good point.

Paul Vernon:

I think college basketball.

Marcus:

Interesting.

Paul Vernon:

I think women's sports, which they've obviously tried to tap into that with the FIFA Women's World Cup, but there's plenty more where that came from in terms of the surging interest in a lot of women's sports.

Marcus:

Yeah.

Paul Vernon:

So there are definitely things Netflix can and will do short of a giant NHL, NFL, MLB, NBA deal, which those are not really available right now, but there's a lot more that they-

Ross Benes:

It is interesting to think about if Netflix grabbed an international league, let's say like some of the European basketball, how that would probably help popularize it outside its region because just so many people have Netflix. It'd be looked at as a very valuable rights partner for that purpose.

Marcus:

Yeah. Great points, gents. Let's move to round three real quick, the show stopping argument. Our chefs will pull out their best closing arguments as to why their trend is most likely to happen. Let's go, 20 seconds or less. Ross, your take.

Ross Benes:

Well, streaming operators are under immense pressure to grow their revenues and show profits and the amount of revenue they can bring in from large advertisers is going to get tapped out. So to reach their full potential, they're going to lean more heavily on small and mid-market advertisers where there are just many more players to choose from.

Marcus:

And for you, Paul?

Paul Vernon:

I think it's a big world out there and tech companies are best positioned to take advantage of that global interest and they can be a lot more nimble than traditional broadcasters. So I think that's part of what's fueled the tech boom, so to speak, in sports licensing, and it's just going to continue with Netflix as now a major player.

Marcus:

Yeah, great arguments, gents. There was another point to the Netflix and sports trend prediction from The Economist, basically saying live sports are a good fit for Netflix now that they offer ads. The article was saying that live sports offer ample downtime before and during games, making it a well suited fit for ad breaks, a lucrative source of revenue, and noting that even subscribers to Netflix's ad free packages were shown commercials during the Christmas Day NFL broadcasts.

So time now to crown a star taker, baker, and this episode I'm giving it to Paul. Congratulations to Paul. It was very close to indeed, but this one I think is fascinating from Netflix and sports, even though I agree 100% with Ross' take as well. Thank you gents, so much for hanging out with me for today's episode. Thank you first to Ross.

Paul Vernon:

Thanks Marcus.

Marcus:

Thank you to Paul.

Paul Vernon:

Thank you let me take.

Marcus:

And thank you to the whole editing crew, Victoria, John, Lance, and Danny, Stuart who runs the team, and Sophie who does our social media. Thanks to everyone for listening in. We hope to see you on Tuesday for the Behind the Numbers Show, an eMarketer podcast. Happy long MLK weekends folks.