At a press conference, MLS Commissioner Don Garber said MLS Season Pass is “averaging 120,000 unique viewers” per match and is “almost a 50%” increase from 2024. We don’t know if the provided number represents the peak concurrent viewers or the average minute audience (AMA). In 2022, ESPN reported that the 2022 MLS regular season audience averaged 343,000 viewers, all from the U.S., and I am unsure of the viewership numbers at the RSN level.

It is also worth noting that multiple games are played concurrently on the MLS Season Pass app. The quoted number represents the average viewers per game, not the total number of viewers on the MLS Season Pass app at any given time. Comparing TV viewership metrics to streaming is challenging, as we lack clarity on how MLS defines a “unique” viewer.

While some want to highlight the fact that viewership of MLS streaming is down when compared to linear TV, no one should be surprised. By removing MLS from linear TV and transitioning exclusively to streaming distribution with Appe, MLS sacrificed reach in exchange for increased content licensing revenue. That was the tradeoff MLS made. Having it stream on Apple opened it up to an international audience and exposed MLS to Apple TV+ subscribers, with a limited number of matches available for free; however, that hasn’t been enough to compensate for the decline in viewership numbers when compared to linear TV distribution. Neither Apple nor MLS breaks out viewership details, but I do know that the majority of viewership comes from the U.S., which is no surprise, since 27 of the 30 teams are U.S. teams and the other three are from Canada.

If MLS wanted to grow the sport, from a viewership standpoint, they should have done both linear and streaming distribution deals. When Apple and MLS announced the agreement, I found it odd for the MLS Commissioner to describe it as a great deal for “casual viewers,” and Apple described it as great for “anyone who loves sports.” Casual viewers and sports enthusiasts who do not closely follow the MLS would likely not purchase an MLS Season Pass subscription. They would come across the game on ESPN or another broadcast channel, as they already have access to it. With games streaming on Apple, you have to proactively search them out and pay for them.

MLS says its league “is the fastest-growing soccer league in the world, more than doubling in size to 29 clubs over the last 15 years.” That may be, but simply adding more teams doesn’t guarantee that they will automatically grow viewership for games through an exclusive streaming distribution deal. That said, I acknowledge that viewership figures alone are not the sole metric MLS uses to determine the league’s success. Sponsorships, ticket sales, and other revenue streams must also be considered.

Here’s a list of TV and streaming viewership stats for recent sports events and seasons across baseball, golf, tennis, car racing, hockey, soccer and other sporting events:

⚾ The MLB Home Run Derby averaged 5.73M viewers on ESPN, a 5% increase over last year (2024 game competed with the Republican National Convention. The MLB All-Star Game averaged 7.2M viewers on FOX, down 3.5% from 2024.

⚾ FOX’s Baseball Night in America game between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees averaged 3.1M viewers, the largest game so far this season, and up 61% from last year, but down from the high of 3.2M in 2018.

⚾ Through the first 11 games of Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN, viewership averaged 1.7M viewers, up 12% from last year.

⚾ The 2025 NCAA Women’s College World Series (baseball) averaged 2.2M viewers across ESPN/ESPNU, up 11% over last year.

🏎️ The Indianapolis 500 averaged 7.05M viewers on FOX, up 40% from the 2024 race.

🏎️ The current Formula 1 season on ESPN networks has attracted an average of 1.3M viewers, up 17% from the 2024 full-season average. The Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix on ABC averaged 2.3M viewers for the race-only portion of the telecast, the largest live U.S. television audience ever for the event.

🏎️ Prime Video’s inaugural season of the NASCAR Cup Series averaged 2.16M viewers across five events.

⚽ The 2024/2025 season of the Premier League viewership across all NBCUniversal platforms in English and Spanish averaged 510,000 viewers per match window, down 6.5% from the previous year.

⚽ Over 13M viewers tuned in to Prime Video’s debut season of the UEFA Champions League in the UK and Ireland across the 2024–25 season. Amazon did not break out viewer stats for a single game, and it should be noted that Amazon UK does not use Nielsen but rather its first-party data.

🏈 The first six weeks of the 2025 UFL season averaged 612,000 viewers per game across FOX, ABC, ESPN, and FS1, down 25% from last year.

🏈 The 2025 NFL draft averaged 7.5M viewers across all networks and digital channels for the three days, up 27% from last year.

🎾 The 2025 Wimbledon tournament averaged 721,000 total viewers across ABC/ESPN/ESPN2, up 6% from last year. ESPN did not break out viewership for ESPN+.

🏀 The 2025 NBA Finals averaged 10.2M viewers, down 46% from the all-time high of 19M viewers in 2005.

⛳ Across the four rounds of the 2025 U.S. Open (golf) on NBC and USA Network, viewership averaged 2.9M, a slight decrease from 3.1M last year.

🏒 The 2025 NHL Stanley Cup Finals on TNT and TruTV, averaged 2.5M viewers, down 40% from last year and the lowest rating since 2021.

🏇 The 25th presentation of the Kentucky Derby on NBC and Peacock averaged 17.7M viewers, up 6% from last year.

All statistics are from press releases from the respective broadcasters and streaming platforms.

It was only a matter of time before Netflix shared more details on its live streaming infrastructure. Today, in the first of a series of tech blog posts, Netflix provides a detailed examination of the architecture behind its live streaming events and the lessons learned during their development. As Netflix rightfully points out, a unique position for the company is the ability to build support for a single product and have control over the full live lifecycle, from production to screen.

Netflix leverages AWS MediaConnect and AWS MediaLive to acquire feeds in the cloud and transcode them into various video quality levels with bitrates tailored per show. Their cloud-based approach enables dynamic scaling, flexibility in configuration, and seamless integration with their DRM, content management, and content delivery services, which are already deployed in the cloud.

Netflix built a custom packager to better integrate with its delivery and playback systems and also built a custom live origin to ensure strict read and write SLAs for live segments. Content is delivered via its own CDN (Open Connect), with more than 18,000 servers located near viewers at over 6,000 locations and connected to AWS locations via a dedicated Open Connect backbone network.

Netflix utilizes HTTPS-based live streaming due to its widespread support among devices and compatibility with delivery and encoding systems, bypassing UDP even though it would provide ultra-low latency. They utilize AVC and HEVC video codecs, transcode with multiple quality levels ranging from SD to 4K, and employ a 2-second segment duration to balance compression efficiency, infrastructure load, and latency. Netflix delivers the manifest from the cloud instead of the CDN, as it allows them to personalize the configuration for each device.

Netflix said its real-time QoE monitoring is built using a mix of internally developed tools, such as Atlas, Mantis, and Lumen, and open-source technologies, such as Kafka and Druid, processing up to 38 million events per second during some of its largest live events while providing critical metrics and operational insights in a matter of seconds.

See their post for more detailed information.

Deltatre announced plans to acquire Endeavor Streaming in a deal expected to close this quarter. This was a long time coming for Endeavor Streaming, as the company had been on the market with a term sheet for a considerable period, with discussions among numerous vendors taking place for more than 12 months. Endeavor Group Holdings had been seeking to divest Endeavor Streaming for years, and Endeavor Streaming’s CCO recently left the company to become CRO for Deltatre. The goal of selling off Endeavor Streaming only accelerated after Silver Lake closed its $25 billion deal to take Endeavor private earlier this year. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed, and I will not highlight Endeavor Streaming’s numbers, as I saw them in confidence from other CEOs who were looking at the company.

However, do NOT listen to Google AI, which says, “As of July 2025, NeuLion’s (now Endeavor Streaming) annual revenue reached $750 million.” That’s not even in the ballpark, and Google should be ashamed to produce a number that’s more than 3x what’s accurate. Another website says, “Based on available information, Endeavor Streaming’s annual revenue was $171.1 million in 2025. Another source states, “Endeavor Streaming’s estimated annual revenue is currently $40.2 million per year,” while a third reports, “Endeavor Streaming has 750 employees and revenue of $55.5 million.” Use numbers at your own risk!

In my view, the challenge Deltatre is facing is the lack of any messaging from the company since its acquisition by Bain Capital and Nextalia in 2022, from Bruin Capital. After the acquisition, many members of the executive team left, and the company has never messaged what the acquisition means or why it is beneficial to the company or its customers.

Bruin Capital stated that Deltatre was expected to generate $180 million in revenue in 2022 and was “outperforming the market,” but no further details about the company have been released. Since the deal, insiders have reported that Deltatre’s revenue growth has declined, making it unclear where the business stands.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to review Bending Spoons’ product roadmap for its Brightcove platform, providing the company with feedback at the executive level. While I can’t share the company’s detailed document, Bending Spoons is allowing me to highlight some of their plans for Brightcove’s product line and where they are investing.

Overall, I appreciated the clarity of their product strategy and their plans to build on Brightcove’s existing strengths by enhancing the reliability, performance, and user experience of the core products, while continuing to cater to the unique needs of their media and enterprise customers. Bending Spoons identified and reviewed over 100 feature requests and improvements, using data tied to revenue potential, operational costs and customer feedback to identify and prioritize a shortlist of the initiatives with the highest potential to impact their business and customers positively.

The key takeaway from my calls with Bending Spoons’ management team was that they will move quickly, investing in initiatives where they see success and reevaluating those where they don’t. While this sounds like a common-sense approach, it wasn’t always the way Brightcove previously operated, as the company would routinely roll out new products and features without much customer feedback or demand.

Here are some key takeaways on what is being worked on across the Brightcove platform:

• Adding support for Ultra-HD live streaming (Shockingly, Brightcove has never supported live 4K video)
• Improved UX to optimize for vertical video experiences by adding new vertical video components in the Gallery for an out-of-the-box solution
• A set of AI features, including improvements to Auto-Captions, Universal Translator, Metadata Enhancer, Content Multiplier, and new AI Advertising features
• Improving live streaming with SSAI, with the addition of content protection through DRM
• A visual redesign of the web player and significant Android SDK improvements
• Improvements to programmatic user provisioning and deprovisioning, streamlining onboarding/offboarding and reducing admin overhead
• Improving the Brightcove Player’s caching system to optimize page load times (not video start times)
• Improvements to viewership analytics, closed caption metrics, improved automated insights and search
• Roll out automated usage alerts to notify customers when they reach key thresholds, providing more transparency

With Brightcove’s new product roadmap now defined and shared with all Brightcove employees, the team is working to determine packaging and pricing strategies for select high-impact features, including the AI Suite, Live 4K, and the Recommendation Engine. Further details on packing and pricing are expected to be released shortly. Bending Spoons has also identified several potential opportunities for future iterations of its roadmap and is monitoring usage data, customer interviews, and market trends, reassessing these opportunities regularly.

In my conversations with the new owners of Brightcove, I was impressed by the time they spent talking to customers, gathering real-world feedback, and making product decisions based on data, rather than guesswork. Bending Spoons communicated a clear and detailed strategy to enhance the platform and expand the business, which will organically lead to sales. Bending Spoons told me they know execution is everything, and their success will lie in how quickly they learn and adapt as they begin to execute individual initiatives and communicate their strengths to customers. I think their product road map is on point, and if they execute on it, customers should be happy.

Some want to suggest that the “success” of the F1 movie at the box office shows that Apple can and will make more movies of this scale for theatres. However, Apple’s interest in the F1 movie extends far beyond the content. Apple spent a year developing advanced camera technology to capture the sheer force of auto racing, and Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, highlighted that the same tech is baked into the camera of the latest iPhone model. For Apple, the F1 movie was about much more than content. Additionally, Eddy Cue, Apple’s SVP of Services, is a racing enthusiast who sits on the board of directors of Ferrari, so there’s a personal interest in the subject.

With Apple’s F1 movie nearing $300 million in box office receipts, headlines again suggest that Apple is reportedly in talks to acquire the U.S. broadcasting rights for Formula 1, when they become available in 2026. ESPN failed to strike a new deal with Formula 1 during an exclusive negotiating window that closed last year. However, it has been reported that ESPN is rumored to be still interested in Formula 1, but only if they can license select races, rather than the entire season.

Apple has previously stated that it prefers content licensing deals similar to those of the MLS, where it holds global rights. However, a worldwide deal with Formula 1 would be too complicated, as Sky Sports currently holds F1’s media rights for the UK, Germany, and Italy until at least 2029. And last year, Formula 1 announced a 10-year deal naming beIN SPORTS the exclusive broadcaster of Formula 1 racing across the Middle East, North Africa (MENA) and Turkey through 2033.

One of the most significant problems for any company licensing content is that Formula 1 races occur worldwide, and many take place early in the morning or overnight in the U.S. For most content owners, the Formula 1 audience isn’t large enough to justify the rumored $150 million and $190 million per year in domestic rights fees that Formula 1 is seeking.

On July 8th, ESPN reported that across ESPN, ESPN2, and ABC, the 2025 Formula 1 races are averaging 1.3 million viewers, a 7% percent increase over the season-to-date average for the 2024 season.

Even Versant, the new soon-to-be publicly traded company that Comcast NBCUniversal is creating by spinning off most of its cable television networks and related digital assets, who said they are looking to bid on live sports to add to its current portfolio, stated it is not interested in the Formula 1, as the audience is too small.

If a company outside of ESPN wins exclusive or partial rights for the U.S. market, it would be interesting to see if they change the viewer experience. ESPN uses Sky Sports’ feed, so U.S. viewers get the same coverage as fans in the UK. But a new distributor could develop its own coverage, making it more U.S.-focused.

This special CDN focused podcast details the latest on delivery pricing and industry trends. I discuss delivery commits, QoE measurement, DIY deployments, HD HDR bitrates, and the impact of vendors exiting the market. I also cover how content owners perform capacity planning at the ASN level, leaching, latency, and why multicasting and P2P won’t positively impact the industry. The data comes from my CDN pricing survey, as well as hosting panels and private events at the NAB Show Streaming Summit in April, which included OTT platforms, content owners, broadcasters, sports leagues, and others.