Weekly Column: Hollywood and Sports Continue their Courtship

In his capacity as a Columnist for California Sports Lawyer®, Founder and Managing Attorney Jeremy Evans has written a column about the growing courtship between Hollywood streamers and network production for docuseries and professional sports leagues, athletes, and teams.

You can read the full column below.

Hollywood and sports have always seem like great partners for content. That dream to reality scenario is continuing to take shape as Netflix looks to add a National Football League (“NFL”) game or two to its deep roster of titles and series. In addition to live-streamed content, there are also a host of unscripted reality television series titles that are sports focused.

It should come as no surprise that streamers like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple+ are continuing to push sports documentaries and series as another way to reach a portion of the population that loves sports and has access to a streaming platform. Netflix’s approach as a non-majority rights holder to live sports content is to combine a live match with content surrounding the match. Amazon has the NFL’s Thursday Night Football and Apple+ has the entire Major League Soccer (“MLS”) season and they also have a host of documentaries, but not necessarily related to underlying match.

Netflix, starting with Formula One (“F1”) racing and the “Drive to Survive” series, helped push television viewers to F1 through the docuseries, but the underlying television rights were on another network or streamer. Netflix wants to take the novel approach of highlighting the sport through have a one-off NFL game that coincides with much more content beyond the game. That non-live ancillary content stands to be marketable to an even broader audience. Here, Netflix would be double-dipping to create buzz for a match it will have the rights to, which means more viewers and advertising dollars.

Amazon, HBO (Warner Discovery), ESPN (Disney), Fox Sports, and Apple+ could learn from Netflix in the point that creating content for viewers is great, but creating content that also increases viewership in programming under company control is better. Amazon, Apple, HBO, Fox Sports, and Apple+ are actually better situated comparatively than Netflix because the live sports inventory and copyright rights is much broader. Imagine for example watching a “Hard Knocks” episode directly before the live match and commentary on the game on HBO.

Amazon, HBO (Warner Discovery), ESPN (Disney), Fox Sports, and Apple+ also have the production capability and history to do both live and film and series content. Fox was once an entertainment giant prior to selling to Disney and its most senior executive wants to get back into some entertainment content based on sports leagues and athletes. The aforementioned companies plus CBS (Paramount, Skydance) also control 90%+ of the copyright to live sports broadcasts in the United States and in some aspects, globally, so the ability to develop content is a matter of budgeting and time, not securing rights.

There is also the possibility of major studio, network, and streaming players working together to produce live and unscripted or similar sports documentaries or series. Imagine, for example, a Netflix sports documentary about basketball or baseball that promotes the league and vice-versa on the lives sports outlet like TNT or Fox. Sports continue to be the current and next frontier of content, particularly as the younger generation wants to be entertained as opposed to watching a full game, which does not interest them as much. It is the carrot and stick approach to content that forces interest and investment similar to a gambler betting on a match one might not normally watch. It is also only a matter of time before the content courtship enters the collegiate landscape and dare we say high school ranks through the NIL model.

About Jeremy M. Evans:

Jeremy M. Evans is the Chief Entrepreneur Officer, Founder & Managing Attorney at California Sports Lawyer®, representing entertainment, media, and sports clients in contractual, intellectual property, and dealmaking matters. Evans is an award-winning attorney and industry leader based in Los Angeles and Newport Beach, California. He can be reached at Jeremy@CSLlegal.com. www.CSLlegal.com.