Live Sports on OTT
Last updated November 2026
Direct answer
Live sport moved to streaming in three waves: Amazon's exclusive NFL Thursday Night Football (from 2022), Apple's MLS Season Pass (2023), and cricket in India — JioCinema's free 2023 IPL and JioHotstar's record 2025 seasons. Sport is now the main weapon streamers use to justify subscriptions, because it is the last appointment viewing.
Sport is the last thing that makes millions of people watch the same thing at the same time — and streaming bought it. This guide covers the rights migration, the records, and what it costs.
Why do streamers want live sport?
Retention. A subscriber who watches one drama series cancels when it ends; a subscriber whose team plays every week does not. Sport also solves streaming's oldest weakness — no appointment viewing — and its advertising value is unmatched: live audiences cannot skip ads.
The strategic logic was stated bluntly by every rights executive of the 2020s: sport is a subscription acquisition cost, and the leagues — NFL, IPL, Premier League — discovered they could extract streaming-scale money for it.
Which rights moved to streaming?
The NFL's Thursday package went exclusively to Amazon in 2022 (about $1 billion a year); Sunday Ticket went to YouTube in 2023 (about $2 billion); Peacock streamed the league's first exclusive playoff game in January 2024 to about 23 million viewers; Apple took MLS (2023) and baseball packages; Netflix added Christmas games and live events; and in India, IPL digital rights — about $2.7 billion for 2023–27 — became the largest streaming-sport deal on earth relative to its market.
The pattern: leagues learned that tech platforms pay more than broadcasters because they buy growth, not just audience.
What are the records?
JioHotstar's 61 million concurrent viewers during IPL 2025 is the largest live stream ever attempted at scale, alongside the 2023 JioCinema free IPL season that first proved free streaming could carry a $2.7-billion rights bill through advertising. In the US, the streaming-exclusive NFL playoff game (2024) and YouTube's Sunday Ticket represent the same experiment at Western prices. The through-line is that sport, not drama, has produced every streaming viewership record in history.