Over the past couple of years, streaming services have started investing more heavily in live sports. Peacock airs Premier League matches, Amazon has exclusive NFL games every season, Apple TV+ has a big contract with the MLS; almost every major streamer is at least having conversations about making these types of deals happen. Netflix, the leading streaming service in the country, hasn’t yet gotten involved in live sports, but people have wondered if some kind of move was on the horizon.
Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos was asked about the possibility of live sports during the quarterly earnings Q&A this week. While he didn’t fully rule things out, Sarandos explained that Netflix’s unscripted sports programming is currently the primary focus.
Videos by ComicBook.com
“Our position in live sports remains unchanged,” Sarandos said. “We’re super excited about the success of our sports adjacent programming. We just had it recently — just launched a great one called Quarterback with the NFL. A few weeks ago, we had Tour de France, which did exactly what we saw with Drive to Survive, which is introduced to a brand new audience to a sport that’s been around for a really long time and not very well understood and you do that through exceptional storytelling, not through the liveness of the game.”
He continued on to say that the unscripted sports shows the streamer currently offer act as a way for subscribers to be a part of sports year round, not just while they’re in season.
“So, by doing that, we can now offer this wide variety of sports programming for sports fans that’s in season year round and it really leans on our strengths, which are storytelling,” Sarandos added. “So we’re really excited about that. And you read some of the experimental stuff that we’re going to be doing, like this live golf match in November. And we’re excited about that because it serves as a promotional vehicle for our sports brands like full swing and Drive to Survive. So we really think that we can have a really strong offering for sports fans on Netflix without having to be part of the difficulty of the economic model of live sports licensing.
Quarterback Is a Quick Hit for Netflix
The unscripted Quarterback series is Netflix’s first partnership with the National Football League, and it has been pretty popular since its launch. The series has been one of the biggest shows on Netflix since its launch, and it appears Netflix has already renewed it for a second season.
“Season 2 has been greenlit by Netflix, we’re excited, we’re hoping for more quarterbacks, it’s easier to say yes,” executive producer Payton Manning said on a recent episode of the Pat McAfee show. “I don’t want to hear ‘It’s going to be a distraction’ because that’s not true, Patrick Mahomes proved that, Kirk Cousins proved that, Marcus, the way he handled that, proved that. We’re hoping that guys after seeing it say this is going to be a cool thing that I can show to my kids when I’m older, show to my grandkids one day. Hopefully the pitch will be easier.”
