Live sports change the game for your platform

Entertainment streaming platforms are under increasing pressure to hold attention, reduce churn and make advertising work at scale.

In that environment, live sports is no longer a side experiment or a separate business. It is becoming a strategic lever inside broader entertainment platforms.

Across the industry, sports is being integrated into entertainment services not to turn them into sports-first destinations, but to attract premium audiences, increase engagement, and strengthen competitiveness in an increasingly crowded market.

This shift is not driven by hype, it is driven by structural market pressure.

The economics of attention are changing

Subscription growth has slowed, and churn is now a more critical metric. Audiences are fragmented across platforms and devices, subscription fatigue is increasing and viewers are more selective about what they pay for and how long they stay.

At the same time, advertising is regaining importance. Ad-supported and hybrid models are becoming standard, offering greater affordability for viewers while strengthening operator revenue. Platforms are also seeking content that drives retention and engagement.

Live sports remains one of the few content types that consistently does this.

Unlike on-demand viewing, sports creates unique shared moments. Audiences arrive together, stay engaged for long periods and react in real time. That level of attention is increasingly rare, and increasingly valuable.

Sports changes the platform, not just the offering

Bringing sports into an entertainment platform is not simply a content decision. It is not only about offering live rights, it is about blending sports into the broader proposition to maximize value, reduce churn and unlock new revenue opportunities.

The real challenge is integration. Sports must work alongside films, series and other live programming in a way that strengthens the overall offering and drives engagement and subscription growth.

What is changing is how sports is positioned. Rather than standing apart, sports is increasingly embedded into the core entertainment strategy to support retention, enable hybrid monetization and create appointment viewing.

However, sports cannot be treated like any other content category. Live audiences arrive simultaneously, rights are complex and time-bound and tolerance for friction is low. These realities place new demands on the platform: delivery must handle synchronized spikes, personalization must reflect team loyalty and monetization must function within the live moment.

Platforms built primarily for on-demand viewing often struggle when sports is added without rethinking these fundamentals.

What “being ready” actually looks like

Media companies that succeed with sports inside entertainment platforms tend to focus less on surface features and more on platform readiness.

In practice, this often includes capabilities such as:

• Resilient live delivery using multi-CDN strategies and elastic cloud scaling
• Hyper-personalization driven by team loyalty and league affinity
• Real-time adaptation to deepen fan engagement throughout live events
• Fast start-up pipelines to reduce time to first frame during live events
• Real-time monitoring of playback quality, buffering and errors
• Rights-aware content discovery, so users only see what they can access
• Secure playback using multi-DRM and session-based authorization
• Hybrid monetization support, including in-stream and non-intrusive ad formats
• Data pipelines that connect live viewing, monetization and retention signals

These are not edge cases. They are the capabilities that determine whether sports strengthens an entertainment platform or exposes its weaknesses.

From moment to momentum

Sports can be a powerful accelerator. It brings urgency, attention and premium audiences. But without the right platform foundations, that momentum fades quickly when the season ends.

Platforms that extract long-term value from sports use data to understand behavior, refine experiences and extend engagement beyond live events. They treat sports as a structural capability, not a one-off initiative tied to a single tournament or season.

As sports continues to move into mainstream entertainment offers, the key question facing media companies is no longer whether to include it.

It is whether their platforms are ready for what sports brings with it.

If you are building or evolving an entertainment streaming platform and want to discuss how to prepare it for sports at scale, connect with our Irdeto Experience experts.