Netflix is leaning into live sports by combining athletes from Formula 1 and the PGA Tour into an event they are calling “The Netflix Cup”, which will air as a live sports event on Netflix. So instead of buying the rights to a sports league they are just creating their own event. I love it!
Formula 1 and Golf are hot right now (but with all things cyclical they may not be for long), so it makes sense to capitalize on this live event mashup.
According to the article “Netflix announced it would broadcast “The Netflix Cup” live, a matchup between athletes that appeared in the Formula 1 docuseries and the golf series “Full Swing.” The athletes will compete in a match play tournament in Las Vegas to kick off the week of the Formula 1 Heineken Silver Las Vegas Grand Prix.”
This is indicative of a larger trend in the media industry to showcase live sports events, which tend to have higher viewership, because no one wants to watch a sports event where they already know the winner (trust me, as a NY Giants fan if I get a notification that they lost I’m not rushing home to watch it on demand now that I know the score).
Fans put a huge emphasis on watching sports live, demonstrated by “when the return of the National Football League and college football seasons propelled both broadcast and cable-TV viewership. Broadcast sports viewership was up 360%, compared to 222% during the same period last year, while cable TV got a nearly 25% increase in sports watchers, according to data from Nielsen.”
Sports programming still dominates TV, and Netflix is leaning more into it