Looking at Live Sports on CTV in 2025

Demand forecasting will become much easier when humans finally stop changing. Until then, predicting winners, business demand and future events remains a complicated endeavor. While prognosticating sports winners and losers is often a coin toss, we can confidently say that 2025 will yield a bumper crop of digital sports viewers. 

EMarketer projects that in 2025, there will be 82 million traditional pay/live viewers versus 114 million digital live sports viewers. Two years ago, things were different. There were 97 million traditional pay/live viewers versus 84 million digital live sports viewers. 

That’s a sea change, coinciding with better sports programming across nearly all major streaming channels. There’s also a demographic shift, with younger viewers preferring digital channels, especially for sports. According to Greenfly, “Consumers ages 18-24 are over 2x more likely to live-stream sports than fans ages 55+.” And it’s a virtuous cycle. Sports teams use digital social channels to improve fan engagement. The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) reports that it “set a single-season record with nearly 2 billion video views across its social media platforms, more than quadruple last season’s total (378 million).”

As we observed in June, “CTV is becoming the center of gravity for sports advertising.” Let’s look below with a few examples, at some bright, leading indicators of why 2025 will be another banner year for streaming sports. 

NFL: The real impact of live sports programming is evident in one telling stat: 93 of the top 100 programs last year were NFL broadcasts, according to Nielsen, up from 82 in 2022, according to Sportico. Thursday Night Football is a proxy for gauging streaming’s impact on this popular sport. “Be it a greater viewer familiarity with streaming, a stronger game schedule, or something else, TNF has seen its ratings spike in 2024,” reports Sports Video. “Entering Week 9, TNF is averaging 13.22 million viewers, an increase of +11% over TNF on Prime’s 2023 season average (11.86M), and +38% above the 2022 TNF season average (9.58M).” After paying the NFL a reported $150 million in rights fees, Amazon’s Thursday Night Football crew will air a Wild Card playoff game in early 2025.

MLB: Baseball viewership saw robust, double-digit growth in the 18-34 audience on ESPN, FS1 and MLB Network in 2024. MLB.TV reported a new high of 14.5 billion minutes watched on streaming services, up 14% over 2023, said MLB. Digital engagement on MLB social media platforms recorded “double-digit year-over-year growth on Instagram (+28%), X (+69%), Facebook (+17%) and YouTube (+33%).” 

Olympics: Peacock blossomed during the Paris Games this summer. According to NBCUniversal, Peacock saw a 39% growth in monthly watch time. The parent company said it “streamed every medal and every moment, amounting to up to 60 concurrent single live event streams and up to 300 live events a day during the first week alone.” Warner Bros. Discovery reported that there were “four times as many unique streaming viewers on Warner Bros. Discovery platforms, including Max and Discovery+, throughout the Games compared to the last summer Olympics.” 

NBA: The league’s new $76 billion media rights deal, revealed in July, heralds a shift in how and where hoops fans will catch games in 2025. In short, there will be more Amazon Prime, Disney’s ESPN and NBCUniversal Peacock and less on NBA’s historic linear home of TNT. Digiday reported that “Peacock and Amazon’s involvement is a milestone for sports media and streaming. Tech firms want more growth from their streaming services, and they believe that premium sports coverage is the way to attract more subscribers and eke out more advertising revenue from their ad-supported tiers.” The streamers want more hoops content. Peacock may pick up additional games from NBC Sports’ Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) in 2025 to help lure more paid subscribers to its streaming service. 

Bigger rights deals, more opportunities

Large streaming deals such as the NBA’s mirror CTV’s rise. Sports league deals benefit from CTV adoption, which has mushroomed from 15% to over 85% of U.S. households in just over a decade. The advertising industry has taken note. 

One example is Mondelez, a consumer product goods company that earlier this year said it shifted its linear TV outlay from 42% down to 15% of its total media spend. Mondelez is also testing data-driven shopper marketing as it expands into CTV, according to AdExchanger.

Last year, approximately 87% of CTV inventory was transacted programmatically, according to Insider Intelligence, which may increase as the available pool of CTV inventory continues to grow along with subscriber demand for streaming sports and other forms of entertainment.  

Reach out to your account representative to learn more about CTV opportunities, or get started with Viant today.