This entire (short) story is worth reading. Here’s the excerpt:
There are only two winners right now — Netflix and live sports, Axios Media Trends author Sara Fischer writes.
Netflix has the lowest rate of subscriber churn of any major streamer, and it’s one of the few companies that isn’t saddled with debt from big mergers or dead weight from linear TV.
Sports, meanwhile, is the only thing that can draw a big crowd anymore, and paying for the rights to live sports may be cable companies’ best/only hope to hang on to more of their customers.
…only insofar as the action of the live sport is authentic, meaning there are no external influences (specifically gaming), affecting the actions in the field of play.
We enjoy the WWE, but we don’t bet on it because we know the results are rigged. As Gambling keeps penetrating sports, it is going to require serious oversights to keep the games genuine, otherwise it will become nothing more than the WWE and viewership will erode. Point shaving and thrown games simply can’t happen.
I had a friend who said this didn’t matter because we don’t know for sure who is going to win. My reply was that the participants knew who would win, and that makes all the difference.
