Sooth founder and CEO Ian Baer comes on Market Domination Overtime to share his firm’s insights into how sports viewers are watching and engaging with games and who the biggest sports media winners could be in the streaming era.
So it sounds like you’re saying here, uh, fans aren’t, they aren’t abandoning sports, but maybe they’re sort of changing how they consume it. So explain that.
Well, yeah, and look, the the sports landscape itself is evolving. So the fans are changing, the economics are changing. We took a look at uh 67 million people in this country who stream at least two hours a week of live sports. It’s a a massive population. And when we segmented it, what we found was they broke up into five tribes for lack of a better term.
So about half of the people streaming all the live sports are your traditional big platform, big game sports viewers, the the ones who have been supporting it for decades and decades.
But the other four, there’s all some sort of an adjacency connected to one.
So it’s people maybe who fall in love with sports through playing sports video games. And then they want to actually watch those athletes.
Or they’ve got money on the game between the betting platforms and the prediction markets. Or for some people, it’s a pop culture event.
It’s they’re excited about the Knicks, they’re excited about the World Cup, the Olympics, Taylor Swift’s husband happens to play in the NFL. So all of a sudden somebody who’s never watched a football game is a huge Kansas City Chief’s fan. But, you know, if if somehow Travis Kelsey got traded, they’d become a fan of that team.
So, so we see all these adjacencies and especially this this splitting of sports viewership, all the fragmentation is really happening with people under the age of 35. So they’re very much setting the stage as the whole industry continues to evolve and splinter. Yeah. They’re shaping where the money’s going to go as well as the eyeballs.
I heard, it was funny, I heard sports reporter Michael Wilbon talking about his son, who’s a younger guy, and Wilbon was saying how his son and his friends, they don’t watch full game, they’re sport, huge sports fans, but they don’t watch full games anymore. They’re watching clips and highlights on social media, which I thought was interesting.
Very much so. And in fact, look, anyone who has Direct TV or um, uh Apple TV or any of the platforms that now will pop up sports alerts to say, hey, top of the ninth, game is tied, Shohei Ohtani is at the plate is playing exactly to that audience that cares much more about the moment than any particular athlete, any team, any platform.
They’re just chasing that culturally relevant touchstone. Uh and and the platforms especially for the people, you know, the last adjacency we didn’t talk about is a tech adjacency and the person for whom watching a game is a multi screen moment to moment kind of pingging experience.
Who do you think ultimately wins here then? Like looking ahead? Like is it leagues, is it Big Tech, cable, streaming services? Is it all of the above?
Our data says the big windfall should go to ESPN. Because and ESPN, you know, they’ve been down on their knees for a decade now. They’ve watched audiences dwindle because they haven’t really been able to keep up with all that fragmentation. But now, think about all those lanes we just discussed.
You know you call it, I thought it was interesting, you refer to ESPN as is the anchor subscription, right? So what did you mean by that, the anchor?
Because it’s the place where live sports streamers will be able to get the most content at the lowest cost. Now the people who want to go deep, especially the gamblers, you know, they’ll pay the extra for the app subscription, but, you know, for a basic cable or or basic uh streaming platform subscription, you do get a lot of sports content and and think about those moments that we spoke about being the cultural touchstone. Well, for for people of a certain age like me, that’s the model that Sports Center created.
So, you know, they’ve got this this multi-times a day broadcast where they’re bringing together all those culturally relevant moments you’re going to want to talk about tomorrow. So between offering so much value to that mainstream uh viewing population, but also the ability to appeal to the gamblers, to appeal to the culture chasers.
We think ESPN is is going to be the big winner. Probably on the the wrong side of the equation are all the regional sports networks. and we’ve been watching them die off slowly. We watch, you know, the collapse of the Diamond Sports deal with Major League Baseball, and as this fragmentation continues, it’s just not going to be financially
They’ll probably more start to look to monetize things like uh, you know, D2 and high school sports and things where they don’t have to pay the big rights fees.
You mentioned betters. How is sports betting sort of impacting everything we’re talking about here?
Well, it it touches it all. It’s not going away. It’s a growing issue, but now the convergence with prediction markets starts to make things really interesting. We saw a huge surge in uh World Cup betting volume uh through Kalshi, through the prediction markets and that was more female than what we generally see from the betting market. It got pretty young.
And here’s the thing, the prediction markets right now aren’t chasing the game from a regulatory standpoint. They’re ahead of it. So in markets where where traditional gambling still has some hurdles, they’ve got nothing but green lights in the prediction market side. and we think volume will continue to go there, but we also think the traditional platforms like the FanDuels and the DraftKings will have to step up their relationships with the leagues or they’re not really going to have the business to protect.
Uh let me ask you, so big NFL guy, right? Let’s say five years from now, I’m watching Monday night football. I’m just How do you think that experience sort of evolves for me? What how does it change? Like in the look, the feel, how I experience it? What would you guess? What would you forecast?
Well, a lot will have to do with the flow of information. People have really gotten used to consuming two or three screens of simultaneous information during the game. Some of the platforms are already for for people who have Direct TV for example, they’ll actually allow scoreboards to run on the screen next to the live content and you can customize all that. So I think the continued information-based customization of the experience, the screens I want, the information that’s important to me, am I the kind of person who likes the whole game?
Do I want to just watch the 10 most important plays afterwards? It’s going to become much more customized and and much more kind of self-forming and and and also the the financial game. Uh, it’s going to create some splintering because look right now, to watch every single Yankee game in 2026 for a cable subscriber, it costs over $1400. You can buy a season ticket package for less than that for a lot of pro teams.
So they’re going to be people who want to pay through the nose and get the most access and the most customization, and then for half the people, they’re still just going to be happy watching the big game when it’s on Monday night football.
Excellent analysis. As always Ian, appreciate it. Thank you, sir.
Thank you so much. Good seeing you, Josh.
