Why are there so many sports subscriptions?
I keep thinking about how watching your favorite team used to be a single transaction. Now it's a portfolio of apps, each demanding its own fee, and Pete Oliver's explanation from inside DAZN makes the logic clear: rights holders want more money, so they split the content into smaller, pricier pieces. That's the business side, and it's hard to argue with the math. But I'm more interested in what this does to the ritual of fandom.
There's something communal about gathering for a big match that gets diluted when everyone's watching on a different platform with a different subscription. The fragmentation raises costs and also splits the shared experience into individual purchases. I'd want to know whether fans will eventually push back or just quietly accept that following a league now costs as much as a streaming bundle for movies and music combined.
Maybe the real story is that sports are becoming a luxury good, and that changes who gets to care about them. I don't have a neat answer, but I suspect the next few years will tell us whether the pile of subscriptions collapses under its own weight or just keeps growing.