Apple just spent $750 million over five years for Formula 1’s US rights. Paramount Plus is moving in on streaming every UEFA Champions League match, Amazon holds Thursday Night Football, and Netflix now offers live sports. The spend is enormous, but does paying hundreds of millions for rights actually convert into a loyal community of engaged fans? Or are these platforms simply acquiring an existing audience in the hope that they’ll stay?
The billion-dollar bet
Apple is paying around $150 million per year for Formula 1 rights, significantly more than the $90 million ESPN was paying. F1’s US fanbase reached 52 million in 2024, with explosive growth among younger demographics. So it makes sense to buy the rights, capture the audience, and grow the platform.
Except audiences aren’t simply assets on a balance sheet.
When Apple’s F1 coverage launches in 2026, it’ll only be available behind a $12.99 monthly subscription. Have F1 essentially sacrificed long-term audience growth on accessible platforms for short-term cash from a paywalled streaming service? It was ESPN’s free-to-air coverage that built the 52 million fanbase, and now Apple is expecting fans to pay for access?
In the UK, Paramount has secured exclusive UEFA Champions League streaming rights (starting in 2027) moving games from TNT Sports. So fans who’ve followed their clubs for decades will now need to fork out for another subscription.
Are fans the real cost?
According to a recent AP-NORC poll, about 4 in 10 sports fans now use both cable and sports-only streaming platforms. The New York Times found the average NFL fan will spend up to $631 per year just to stream games. But that’s what it costs to keep up with the action.
To watch all Premier League matches in the UK, you need Sky Sports, TNT Sports, and Amazon Prime. In the US, following the NBA requires subscriptions to Amazon Prime, Peacock, ESPN platforms, plus league-specific services for out-of-market games.
Fans are juggling half a dozen subscriptions, turning what was once a shared cultural ritual into another burden on the bank balance.
Each platform wants exclusivity to drive subscriptions. But about 6 in 10 sports fans have only subscribed to a streaming service for a specific season, or match, and about half of them cancelled immediately after it ended. That’s not loyalty, it’s short-term thinking.
Views isn’t the same as fan engagement
When streamers acquire rights, they’re buying access to existing fanbases cultivated over decades by leagues, clubs, and previous broadcasters. Communities can’t be bought, they need to be built. Because there’s a big difference between renting attention and earning a sense of belonging.
Most rights deals simply deliver a stream. As sports properties track fan engagement and adjusting pricing, fans are treated more as data points than community members. The irony is that whilst platforms obsess over capturing first-party data to prove value to sponsors, they’re eroding the emotional connection that made those fans valuable in the first place.
Is this sustainable thinking?
US TV and streaming sports media rights payments will total $29.25 billion in 2025, and that’s expected to grow to over $37 billion by 2030. That’s a lot of money chasing the same finite pool of fans.
The return? Apple likely isn’t expecting direct profit from F1 subscriptions. They’re treating sports as a loss leader to grow their services ecosystem the same way Amazon uses Thursday Night Football to drive Prime memberships. These companies can absorb losses in ways traditional broadcasters can’t.
But this model creates vulnerability. If your commercial value depends entirely on rights fees, and those fees plateau because acquired audiences don’t actually convert into retained subscribers, where does the growth come from?
In five years, when this Apple deal expires, will F1’s US fanbase be larger or smaller than it is today? Will those fans behind the paywall feel more connected to the sport, or just more aware of what it costs to watch?
The alternative path
Some organisations have gone a different way. When Ligue 1’s DAZN deal collapsed, they launched their own direct-to-consumer platform, maintaining control of distribution and fan relationships. It was risky, but it paid off.
Building genuine communities of fans requires infrastructure that most rights deals don’t include:
- Platforms for fans to participate, not just watch
- Mechanisms to capture preference and behavioral data that inform content decisions
- Fan engagement loops that reward involvement
- Direct relationships that survive platform changes
Community requires something streaming platforms rarely offer: the willingness to cede control and let fans shape the experience rather than just consume it. Exactly what we recently helped Global Fan Network to do. If spending hundreds of millions just rents temporary access to audiences who leave the moment the price feels too high, the entire model needs rethinking.
Broadcast budgets and community building aren’t the same thing. It’s time the industry stopped pretending they are and started investing in fan engagement.
