The news: NBCUniversal is leaning heavily into live sports to anchor Peacock, stabilize linear TV, and justify a sharply higher sports rights bill.
- Comcast has branded its February slate of tentpole sports events as ‘Legendary February,’ spanning the Super Bowl, NBA All-Star Weekend, and the Winter Olympics, per Bloomberg.
- The company will spend more than $8 billion on sports rights in 2026, up from roughly half that four years ago. Its rights span the Olympics, NFL, NBA, MLB, FIFA World Cup, and WWE.
- NBC reported selling out ad inventory across its February sports slate, with Super Bowl pricing exceeding $10 million per spot.
- Peacock subscribers grew 22% YoY to 44 million in 2025, although the service still posted a $552 million quarterly loss, up 48% YoY, largely due to NBA rights costs.
Why it matters: Sports remains one of the few media categories that still delivers scale, pricing power, and advertiser commitment, but distribution complexity is rising.
- EMARKETER forecasts digital live sports viewers will grow from 114.5 million in 2025 to 137.1 million in 2029, while traditional pay TV live sports viewers decline from 76 million to 58.7 million over the same period.
- Despite that shift, digital accounts for just over one-third of live sports viewing time, even as nearly 70% of live sports viewers now watch digitally, according to EMARKETER and Inscape.
- Fragmentation is creating friction: 52% of US sports fans say finding the sports they want to watch has become more confusing, and 65% say it is a hassle to use multiple services in a single season, per Hub Research.
- Advertisers are following the money and the calendar. Live sports programming accounted for more than 43% of US national TV ad spend in Q4 2024 and remains the dominant driver of Q4 pricing, per iSpot.tv.