As the rising costs of sports rights remain a persistent headache for broadcasters (albeit a delight for league commissioners), a key to understanding the current media landscape lies in understanding sports’ impact on the financial landscape.

As explored in the Variety Intelligence Platform special report “Sports Rights: Streamers vs. TV Networks,” spending on broadcast rights and other sports-related costs unsurprisingly makes up a significant share of content expenses for the largest media companies. Proportionally, the biggest spender is Fox, with more than 60% of its 2024 and 2025 content budgets expected to go toward sports, according to MoffettNathanson estimates issued last month; Disney follows at about 45%.

While sports spending is projected to grow in the long run, MN forecasts most of the legacy media companies will record a slight dip this year as they readjust their budgets.

For instance, Disney’s ESPN is soon dropping its $550 million-per-year Major League Baseball coverage, and NBCUniversal would naturally spend less in a year without the Olympic Games (though Comcast in March secured U.S. Olympics rights for NBC and Peacock through 2036 for a cool $3 billion).

For streaming’s tech players, however, live sports are becoming an increasingly important part of their content strategy. Sports will hold steady at 2% of Netflix’s budget this year even as it increases overall spend by more than $1 billion, while Amazon will devote more than a fifth of its 2025 content outlays to sports thanks to its new NBA deal.

All told, the major players are expected to spend $30.5 billion on sports this year, accounting for more than 20% of their total outlays. This would mark a 5% drop in sports spending from 2024, though a whopping 34% increase from just five years ago.

What value do sports provide to justify these stratospheric fees? Plenty: The genre drives engagement, promotes new subscriptions, reduces churn and increases time-on-platform stats for streaming services, while being more or less the sole remaining appointment viewing on linear TV.

Live sports broadcasts, after all, accounted for a record 74 out of the top 100 primetime U.S. telecasts in 2024 and continue to draw in the high-paying advertisers networks covet.

As such, they will likely continue to account for an ever-larger share of media companies’ spending so long as the audiences are there. And there’s no indication that audiences are going anywhere but up.

Now dig into the related VIP+ subscriber report …