Last month, a Tennis Canada employee stepped to the microphone at a sports industry gathering in downtown Toronto and asked a collection of executives from Sportsnet, TSN, CBC and the streamer DAZN for advice on one of the most frustrating facts of life for fans. “How would you explain that one day [a sport] is on Amazon, the other day it’s on Netflix, the other day it’s on Sportsnet?” he said, during a panel discussion at the annual Primetime Sports and Entertainment Conference.
The staffer explained that he worked in corporate partnerships and some of the sponsors, as he put it, “don’t really understand the TV reality.” They’re not alone.
Over the past decade or so, the fantasies of sports fans have come true to an overwhelming extent: They now have access to a dizzying array of broadcast channels and streaming services pumping out an all-you-can-eat buffet of live sports, 24 hours a day, from basketball to hockey, cricket to kabaddi.
But even paradise, it turns out, has its limits. Fans are frustrated: By the multiplying number of services carrying the games they used to get in one place; by the challenges of tracking where particular matches are broadcast; by the technological hurdles of toggling between them; by the ever-rising costs.
What they may not grasp is that many of the sources of those frustrations are intentional features rather than bugs of the new landscape. The leagues scatter their games among various services to satisfy different and sometimes competing strategic objects. The services build obstacles into their platforms to keep viewers from straying. And as broadcasters and streamers have become more desperate to secure must-watch live programming, the leagues have extracted ever-higher rights fees, which are passed along to consumers.
Canada’s fractured sports streaming landscape has even die-hard fans feeling shut-out
For years, sports television earned impressive profits, its rising tide floating all boats: leagues, athletes and…