Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos called live sports on the streamer “a really fantastic thing” but said dipping into the NFL, WWE and more “doesn’t really change the underlying economics of full season, big league sports being extremely challenging.”
“We want to be able to bring value to the sport, like we have to date with WWE certainly, like we have with the NFL too, where we were basically able to bring a big audience, a young audience, a more global audience than linear television. But that has to be reflected in the deal as well.”
The platform has a long-term licensing deal with WWE, two NFL games on Christmas day and late last year inked a deal for the 2027 and 2031 Women’s World Cup. Asked on a video call after reporting earnings earlier today whether full season rights would also be attractive, Sarandos said it depends on price. Sports rights’ costs have been skyrocketing as almost the sole programming guaranteed to aggregate a big audience, and with other streamers from Apple to Amazon jumping in to snap up packages.
“If there was a path where we could actually make the economics work for both us and the league, we certainly would explore,” Sarandos said.
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Queried specifically on a possible deal with the UFC — about the only major rights opportunity coming on the market in the next few years — he declined to comment.
His thoughts on live sports are not necessarily new but today he flexed a bit about what Netflix can do for leagues, waxing enthusiastic about views and engagement for the two NFL games — “We’re really thrilled with the viewing. We’re thrilled with everything about it” — and lauding WWE success on the streamer.
Wrestling, on its first week on Netflix, drew about 5 million views, he said, which is about two times the audience that Monday Night Raw was getting on linear television. “We hope to build the audience for the league. We also saw that in non-live viewing, so in the day after the live event, our viewing grew by 25%, mostly outside of U.S. time zones. So, this is new viewing in U.K. and Canada, Mexico, Australia, Brazil is a particularly big market.”
“Just, you know, not to be overly repetitive, but we’re going to be mindful of the bottom line and it’s really important that those economics do work. And the big league sports, full league, full season economics, are very hard to make work.”
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