StreamTime Podcast: Dan Rayburn Has Some Hard Truths about the State of Sports Streaming

Thanks to Nick Meacham and Chris Stone at SportsPro for having me on their podcast to discuss the latest sports streaming restraints around technology, market drives for business models, viewership numbers, and the fragmentation and frustration of the current sports fan viewing experience. We discuss:

🏈 The impact of tech on the market, i.e., Amazon (TNF), Google (Sunday NFL Ticket), and Apple (Friday Night Baseball). With so many big tech companies involved, why does sports streaming still have many outages and technical problems?

📺 The reason sports content will never go streaming only due to the licensing deals tied to pay TV, which still accounts for around 90% of total viewing hours in the US for live sports.

👸 The challenges Disney will have in offering a second ESPN DTC service from a pricing, packaging, and bundling standpoint.

💲 The high price of sports licensing costs and its impact on any streaming service’s ability to become profitable from sports content alone.

📈 The importance of CDNs that make live sports events possible, their role in the market and why low/ultra-low latency is rarely used for live sports events.

🏎 Recent content licensing deals and the upcoming NBA, Formula 1, and Diamond Sports Group deals being discussed.

I had a great time discussing what’s happening in the sports streaming market. Note: The podcast was recorded three weeks before Peacock’s exclusive NFL Wild Card game, hence why that wasn’t discussed in detail. Listen here: https://www.sportspromedia.com/insights/podcasts/dan-rayburn-hard-truths-about-sports-streaming-media-technology-podcast/