Jay Mehta
The Santa Clara
November 9, 2017
Last year, Americans spent 31 billion hours watching sports on TV—a 40 percent increase from 10 years ago. In fact, sports viewership worldwide has steadily increased decade after decade.
People watch football, soccer, basketball, hockey, NASCAR, horse riding, volleyball and more. This comes at a steep cost for TV providers, who pay for the rights to air sports games.
In the last two decades, the cost of broadcaster’s rights to air the English Premier League has increased 25 times over, as media companies have grown to depend on sports subscriptions to avoid losing customers to online streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.