The National Football League (NFL) represents its 32 member teams when bargaining with broadcasters over NFL broadcasting rights. Current broadcasting contracts restrict access to NFL Sunday games based upon a viewer’s location. I develop an endogenous disagreement payoffs extension to the standard bargaining model to describe the interaction between the NFL and broadcasters when allocating broadcasting rights.

Television rights are the largest component of revenues for major sports in large,
rich nations. Among these nations, the market structure for rights varies due to different competition policies towards sports and television. This essay examines how game coverage, revenues and competitive balance are affected by competition in commercial television and sales of rights.

Discussion of FCC, copyright, advertising and other legal issues of importance to radio and television broadcasters and other media companies.

Broadcasting business models that created significant revenue for sports leagues are now facing a new set of challenges as technology and audience behavior patterns are causing tremendous industry disruption. Consequently, how leagues and individual teams navigate these challenges will determine their economic success. This chapter offers insight into this environment by reviewing the salient scholarly literature, identifying the various drivers of broadcast demand, discussing how the dynamic decisions made by industry executives influence broadcast rights agreements, and forecasting what these issues may look like over the next decade.

We estimate that US TV and streaming sports media rights payments will likely total $25.57 billion in 2023 across broadcast, cable, RSNs and streaming services. The digital trend seems to be here to stay as streaming has become a more acceptable way of reaching sports audiences.

This Article examines the Grant of Rights, a legal document that college football conferences currently use to prevent “conference realignment,” or the practice of the colleges and universities that make up the conference moving to another conference. The Grant of Rights has been heralded as the
document that will bring an end to conference realignment, but this Article challenges both the legal and practical effectiveness of the Grant of Rights.

The rise of streaming services and the emergence of the direct-to-consumer (DTC) sports consumption model has transformed the way people watch sports. By 2025, the number of US viewers who stream a sports event at least once a month is projected to rise to over 90 million — a steep rise from 57 million in 2021.

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Once thriving, the regional-sports TV industry is suffering as cable bundles unravel.

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This year, the value of global sports television contracts is projected to reach a high-water mark of $62.4 billion, which is, more or less, the GDP of Slovenia. Nearly half of those TV and streaming bucks will be generated here in the U.S., where the NFL alone accounts for $12.4 billion, or about 43% of the overall stateside haul.