A New York Yankees fan who wants to watch every regular-season game and the playoffs in 2026 will need to navigate ten networks and at least five subscriptions, at a cost approaching one thousand dollars a year.
Pricing reflects lowest available tier that includes required sports access where applicable. Some services shown use ad-supported plans.
Pricing based on publicly available U.S. subscription pricing as of May 2026. Subject to change.
That is the headline. The deeper story is what comes next.
The fragmentation everyone is writing about right now is not a destination. It’s a phase. And phases like this one tend to end the same way.
Recently, the FCC opened a formal comment period on the migration of live sports to subscription streaming. Around the same time, reporting surfaced on a DOJ antitrust review of NFL distribution practices. Senator Tammy Baldwin (D – Wisconsin) recently introduced the For the Fans Act bill, attempting to address the consumer frustrations and perceived injustices.
The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 gave the NFL an antitrust exemption to control TV distribution of its games – over 60 years later and, in an enormously different media landscape, that exemption is now under scrutiny. To watch the NFL in full this season requires roughly ten platforms.
MLB just finalized a 2026 to 2028 rights package that splits national coverage across NBC, Peacock, Netflix, ESPN, FOX, TBS, and Apple.
One driver of the current chaos that gets too little airtime is the arrival of the tech titans. Google bought the NFL Sunday Ticket. Amazon owns Thursday Night Football. Netflix grabbed the Christmas Day NFL game. Apple took Friday Night Baseball. When platforms with two- and three-trillion-dollar market caps decide to use sports as a customer acquisition tool, the legacy networks' bidding logic breaks. Disney, CBS, and NBC are not going to outbid them very often. They are going to lose select inventory and reorganize around what they can defend.
MLB exacerbates fragmentation because, unlike the NFL, it does not collectively bargain its national broadcast rights with all teams. Big-market clubs (Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox) run their own regional networks and print money. Small-market clubs were, until recently, distributed by regional sports networks like Bally Sports, owned by Diamond Sports Group. When Diamond emerged from Chapter 11 in November 2024 and rebranded as FanDuel Sports Networks, it dropped most of its MLB contracts. Beginning this season, the Brewers, Marlins, Royals, Cardinals, Reds, Rays, Tigers, and Nationals were absorbed into MLB Local Media, a direct-to-consumer offering operated by the league. That is one more app, one more login, and one more silo for any advertiser trying to reach baseball fans nationally.
It is also worth being precise about how much of this Monopoly game is centered around football. Of the top one hundred TV viewing events in 2025, more than ninety were sports, and roughly eighty of those were NFL games. The only baseball entry was a single World Series Game 7. Sports viewing in this country is heavily anchored in football, and then everything else. As can be seen in the chart below, the top seven most-watched TV events in the U.S. in 2025 were all football. The NFL is also the only major league where teams play only once a week, which, by itself, creates a scarcity that the ratings reflect.
Top 10 TV Viewing Events of 2025 in the U.S.:
The same paradigm exists in college sports. Football is the big moneymaker, with basketball a distant second. Almost all other college sports, in all conferences, for both genders, are a net expense for the schools.
Hub Entertainment Research found that 87 percent of sports fans report at least some frustration with the complexity of finding games. One in four describes themselves as very frustrated.
The conventional read is that consumers are unhappy and regulators are circling. Both are true. Neither tells you where the next profitable business models will land.
We have seen this pattern before.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the cable industry was a chaotic mosaic of regional operators, premium tiers, and incompatible technical standards. The multiple system operator (MSO) consolidation that followed did not happen because regulators forced it. It happened because the unit economics of running hundreds of small regional operators, each with its own trucks, technicians, and head-end equipment, simply could not match the scale economics of a national aggregator. Customers paid for the bundle because the bundle solved a real problem.
We saw a version of it again with the rise of multi-channel video programming distributors like Comcast, Verizon, and DirecTV in the 1990s, and then again with the streaming launches of the late 2010s, when consumers temporarily traded a single cable bill for a stack of monthly subscriptions on the assumption that streaming was simpler and a better value. It is not simpler anymore and the value has largely dissipated.
The pattern is consistent. Fragmentation creates the conditions for rebundling. The rebundlers capture the value.
What makes the current moment different is that the rebundle will not be assembled by a cable operator using a coaxial line into the home. It will be assembled by aggregators using a relationship layer that sits above the rights deals.
Hub Entertainment is already projecting that 2026 will bring an expansion of bundles from pay-TV operators, telcos, and platforms like Amazon. Amazon is well-positioned because it has identity, payments, an ad business, and increasingly its own rights inventory. YouTube already operates the most-watched live sports product in the country through NFL Sunday Ticket. Disney has the unique position of owning ESPN, Hulu, and a direct-to-consumer flagship that can carry sports as a category, not as a subscription line item.
But the more interesting question for investors is not which of the existing giants wins. Which of the structural problems created by fragmentation gets solved by a B2B layer that none of those giants will build themselves?
Three problems stand out.
1. Discovery: When inventory lives across ten platforms, the question of what sports and other live entertainment is on tonight is no longer a programming problem. It is a graph problem. Whoever builds the rights-aware metadata layer that sits across services becomes the home screen for sports, and for a majority of households, the home screen for sports is the home screen for accessing all content.
2. Ad Inventory: In our view, this is the actual core of the story. Sports is the last reliable source of large, simultaneous, attentive audiences. Fragmenting the rights to carry sports does not fragment the demand from big advertisers. It fragments their ability to plan, buy, and measure across the inventory. If you are a brand trying to reach baseball fans in 2026, there is no single buy that gets you in front of them. You need a plan that spans Apple, ESPN, Fox, CBS, NBC, Peacock, TBS, Netflix, the regional networks that survived, and the MLB Local Media app that absorbed the ones that did not. That is the actual problem the next decade of adtech and commerce media has to solve. The companies that solve cross-platform sports adtech, including AI-driven dynamic creative for live sports moments, will sit atop one of the few growing premium video ad categories.
Small local brands are currently net beneficiaries of this fragmentation because it creates opportunities for them to make spot buys and jump on remnant ad inventory in their markets. Conversely, it’s a nightmare for big national advertisers in search of large quantities of sports CPM’s they previously negotiated with a small number of content owners. Big advertisers are the source of the big money in sports, and their frustrations will help drive the new solutions on the horizon.
3. Creator Economics Around Live Sports: The fragmentation of rights has coincided with a sharp rise in second-screen and split-screen behavior, especially for the NFL, where multiple games air at the same one o’clock kickoff window every Sunday. The audience for live sports is increasingly one that watches while reading a feed, listening to a podcast, or following a creator. The infrastructure that turns moments into clips and clips into distribution across creator platforms in real time is, in our view, an underbuilt category.
There is a reflex in our industry to read the FCC announcement and the DOJ review as a risk to the established media incumbents. That is a first-order read. The second-order read is that the regulatory pressure validates the consumer pain that the rebundle is going to solve.
We invest behind secular shifts in behavior. The behavioral shift here is unmistakable. The American sports fan, who was for fifty years a passive participant in a single-bundle pricing model, is now an active manager of a personal subscription portfolio. That is a fundamental change in how a hundred million consumers relate to media. Consumer behavior does not get unwound. It gets monetized by the next generation of infrastructure.
Pattern recognition over prediction. We are not predicting that the rebundle is coming. The rebundle is already underway. The question is which of the picks-and-shovels companies in discovery, advertising, measurement, and live distribution becomes the layer that everyone else builds on.
Those are the conversations we are having in this moment.