Welcome to The Signal, Box Score's Wednesday newsletter. This week, we're looking at what the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger means for sports fans and why watching your favorite team on TV now costs more than your TV.
The debut of Skydance on the Nasdaq last week was the conclusion of a lengthy and dramatic merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery that dominated the financial and entertainment news for almost a year and created a new Hollywood behemoth.
Skydance now owns the rights to some of the most storied and valuable intellectual property in the world, including Harry Potter, DC Comics, The Lord of the Rings films, Friends, Yellowstone and The Sopranos, among many other franchises.
The merger's impact on televised sports might be just as significant. As a result of the merger, Skydance now holds the US rights to 36 premium sporting events and leagues, a glittering portfolio that includes the NFL, March Madness, MLB, UFC, the Masters, the PGA Tour, the PGA Championship, the Champions League, the NHL, the WNBA and the College Football Playoff.
Skydance also has the rights to broadcast the Olympics in Europe. Insider Sport estimates the annual value of these sports rights at $6.5 billion and the total value of the multiyear agreements at approximately $55 billion.
What does this merger mean for sports fans?
Consolidation might not be a bad thing. Fans following an NFL team out of market or an international soccer club have to subscribe to multiple streaming services or miss important games. According to Bloomberg, a Philadelphia Eagles fan who lives outside the Delaware Valley will have to pay $523 to watch all the Eagles' games this season since different games are on Sunday Ticket ($378), YouTube ($83), Peacock ($33), Fox One ($20) and Prime Video ($9).
One streaming service to rule them all could result in an easier fan experience, and Skydance made that point when announcing the merger:
“The merged company will hold one of the industry's most compelling and competitive portfolios of sports rights ... with the ability to distribute these rights collectively across all of our platforms, thereby giving sports fans easier access to more of the content they want in one place.”
However, being a fan means watching all your team's games, and right now, there's not a single major sports league available in the US where you can watch all the games on a single streaming service.
For example, even though NBC Universal owns the US broadcast rights to the Premier League, fans can't see all the games on Peacock. Some games are exclusively on traditional cable. And if your team qualifies for the Champions League, congratulations. You'll need Paramount+ to watch those games.
What happens next?
Of course, the big omission in Skydance’s merger statement is how much it will cost to watch all these fabulous sporting events. The more properties Skydance owns, the more pricing power the company will have.
That cost is a main concern for most sports fans. According to an Ipsos poll in April 2026, 75% of American sports fans agree there are too many separate platforms needed to watch live sports, and 61% of these fans want a sports streaming package that bundles multiple streaming platforms for one monthly or annual payment.
If the streaming services aren't listening to these complaints, government officials are starting to.
Earlier this year, the FCC launched an inquiry into sports moving from over-the-air and cable broadcasts to higher-priced streaming services, a shift that critics call “streamflation,” and the Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into the NFL for alleged anticompetitive tactics amid fan complaints about streaming prices.
The issue even brought Republicans and Democrats together. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) have both urged the government to protect fans by keeping sports affordable.
The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 gives leagues a limited antitrust exemption that lets teams pool their TV rights and sell them as a package. FCC chairman Brendan Carr said in April that the NFL's move toward streaming could put that exemption at risk. (The NFL argues that the vast majority of its games are on free television, including 100% of games in local markets.)
“That experience has become frustrating for lots of Americans over the years,” Carr said of fans needing to pay for additional streaming services to watch NFL games. “I do think there’s a point at which the NFL reaches a tipping point where they’re sticking too many games behind a paywall, in which case it really raises a lot of questions about the scope of that [exemption].”
But the smart money is on the leagues to continue to extract enormous rights fees from streaming services, and the streamers to pass those costs on to consumers. Many sports fans are already priced out of live events, so what happens when we're priced out of watching live sports on TV, too?
There's always the radio. No latency, either. 📻
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