"Freeish," John Kosner’s Latest SBJ Column with Ed Desser
Original Article: Sports Business Journal, by John Kosner and Ed Desser, July 21st, 2025
Until 1999, music was a physical goods business with high prices and limited choices. Few songs were released as “singles.” The products themselves, vinyl and compact discs, required dedicated playback devices. Napster upended everything — leveraging the internet, high-speed file sharing and ease of use. By 2001, it had exploded to 80 million “free” users. Internet media disruptions started with music, but that same customer liberation quickly spread to newspapers, magazines, advertising, and then to on-demand entertainment and linear TV, via streaming.
Could a “Napster” moment hit big-time TV sports rights? What might that look like?
For the first 50 years of electronic media, content was free. First, device manufacturers subsidized programming to encourage consumers to buy radios and later TVs (ABC and NBC were owned by RCA, the Radio Corporation of America). Then, advertisers provided the subsidy, but content remained free. Until the 70s with cable and pay TV ... regional and national prime-time sports, plus John Malone’s promise of 500 channels, lured us to start paying for video content.
Just 15 years ago, the halcyon days of pay TV and the zenith of the programming bundle, sports content seemed free. Since everyone had cable (90% penetration), games were basically free-ish, delivered via a fixed-cost “utility”... virtually no added cost to watch. Economists would call that “marginal cost” zero, because the bundle was a big fat package — channels, shows and events were rarely available a la carte. Regardless of interests, everyone bought essentially the same bundle. Even better for sports fans: Their viewing “birthright” was subsidized. Every grandmother who bought cable to see HGTV, Lifetime or news (not sports) essentially supported the fans who did. Consumers might be paying the same retail price for their cable subscriptions, but the distributors who retailed cable were paying much higher wholesale prices for the bundle’s live sports networks.
Today, sports continues to grow, and has become the most valuable content genre. However, the impact of Streaming 3.0 (SBJ, March 10, 2025) is becoming felt. Sports rights, even the NFL, are increasingly fragmented and now are perceived to be much more expensive. The good news is that fans can buy practically everything direct. The bad news is that you probably won’t save any money. Tech analyst Ben Thompson did the math: $129.92 monthly for 2025 a la carte; $129.95 for the same lineup prior to ESPN/Fox’s upcoming fall DTC launches. Price isn’t the only problem. With cable, it was easy to switch between games. Not anymore. With a dozen streaming services carrying sports, each a walled garden requiring a separate purchase decision, login, and using a different UI, a shared viewing experience doesn’t currently exist. Worse, the average penetration of streaming services (most homes have four) is under 50%, and 73% want to pay less (SBJ, July 3, 2025). Viewing sports is becoming more complicated, and expensive ... like music 26 years ago.
Enter an existential threat to sports media: free, easy to use pirate sites like StreamEast, only a click away on Google, X or Reddit. Many who grew up with the bundle are less familiar with these services. Not so, younger fans. To date, the media industry’s “whack-a-mole” policing has been ineffective.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod in 2001, Apple solved for Napster — buy any song for $0.99 with an elegant, intuitive device.
We expect to see a free/freemium model develop for a significant number of sports over the next decade.
For some former RSN rights, it’s already here. This spring, JioHotstar offered the first hour of Indian Premier League matches free and then required a subscription to watch the rest. That’s “freemium.” Another recent example was DAZN’s free streaming of the FIFA Club World Cup (CazéTV will stream all 2026 World Cup matches free in Brazil). Fox offered free streaming of the first 5 minutes of its soccer and college football games last year. The NFL’s Chiefs-Chargers season opener on Sept. 5 in Brazil will be available for free globally on YouTube, which claimed 12.5% of all U.S. viewing in May’s Nielsen Gauge, when streaming finally overtook linear TV. The next night, Netflix will stream the Canelo Alvarez-Terence Crawford fight globally. Considering its 300 million-plus worldwide subscribers, that’s “free-ish.”
Today, free content on the internet has spawned a $262 billion digital advertising business, per MoffettNathanson, that dwarfs everything else in media and is helping drive increasingly popular lower-cost streaming tiers. There are powerful forces at play: The unique and ubiquitous popularity and engagement of sports; sports rights holders’ desire for maximum reach; ever-growing customer acquisition costs; the explosive growth of LLMs; competitive, closed-loop ad systems, such as Amazon, Google, Meta and Walmart; 100 million U.S. FAST channel monthly users ... and the millions watching illegally today. This combination could bring about a “free-ish” revolution in sports rights: much more effective, AI-personalized advertising with significant revenue shares to sports rights holders (and guarantees to the biggest). From there, sports media could access additional paid upgrades from literally millions of fans for 8K, sub-second latency (“Live Live”), alt-casts, premium access, virtual goods, ancillary services (Uber Eats, etc.) and whatever else we can imagine. ... plus making pirate sites unnecessary. Want a comp? It’s video games.
The allure of live sports, and the ability to precision target a sports fan who wants to buy a BMW or needs a fancy new AI phone could facilitate bringing premium content to sports fans at little to no marginal cost. Back to the future. How can that be? It starts with free.
Ask ChatGPT
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Ed Desser is an expert witness and president of consultancy Desser Sports Media Inc. (www.desser.tv). John Kosner is an investor in digital startups and president of consultancy Kosner Media (www.kosnermedia.com). Together they developed league TV strategy and ran the NBA’s media operations in the ’80s and ’90s.
