2026 could very well turn out to be the year of consolidation in legacy media.<\/p>\n
Already this year, Paramount successfully overtook Netflix in its pursuit of buying Warner Bros. Discovery<\/a>, ESPN\u2019s acquisition of NFL Network was approved<\/a>, the Nexstar-Tegna deal has been waved through by the DOJ and FCC<\/a>, and Sinclair looks intent on buying Scripps<\/a>.<\/p>\n For many of these companies, consolidation is a last-ditch effort to reach the scale necessary to compete with the tech giants of our day \u2014 Netflix, Google, Amazon, etc. \u2014 which continue to earn a larger share of our collective attention year after year.<\/p>\n Live sports are one of the key battlegrounds for this attention, where broadcast networks like ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC are incumbent forces trying to stave off the inevitable transition to streaming. In recent years, streamers have become part and parcel to the sports viewing experience, with leagues increasingly selling games to streaming platforms and further fragmenting the live sports ecosystem.<\/p>\n To be sure, the last few years have also been a bit of a renaissance for broadcast networks when it comes to sports. While leagues are looking to streamers for some inventory, there\u2019s also been a concerted push for more live sports programming on free-to-air broadcast networks as leagues acknowledge the incomparable reach that channels like ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC have. Additionally, MLB, NBA, and NHL teams have increasingly taken their local media rights to local broadcast stations as the regional sports network model crumbles.<\/p>\n Still, broadcast is a dying industry heavily reliant on the retransmission fees generated by the ever-shrinking cohort of pay TV subscribers, and reverse retransmission fees paid by local affiliates. So as the cost of live sports continues to trend upward, like with the NFL\u2019s ongoing effort to renegotiate its media rights agreements for billions more dollars per year, broadcasters are feeling the squeeze.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why Curtis LeGeyt, CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters, the group that lobbies lawmakers and federal agencies on behalf of the broadcast industry, believes consolidation is critical for the survival of free-to-air broadcast networks and, in turn, widely available and free live sports broadcasts. Appearing on a recent episode of\u00a0The Varsity podcast<\/a> with John Ourand, LeGeyt called consolidation in the broadcast industry \u201cessential\u201d if networks want to continue competing with deep-pocketed streamers for live sports rights.<\/p>\n \u201cI think, for better or worse, [consolidation] is an essential thing right now,\u201d LeGeyt said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m looking at this purely through the lens of broadcast. If we\u2019re going to compete for those NFL sports rights, if we\u2019re going to compete locally to ensure that teams feel like they have a local distribution option that is freely available through local broadcast as opposed to the cable regional sports networks or even streaming, broadcasters need some scale in order to compete for that, and the only way to gain that scale is through some level of consolidation.\u201d<\/p>\n The Trump administration seems to be on the same page. The FCC took the unprecedented step of lifting the cap on a single local station group owning affiliates that broadcast to over 39% of the country when it approved the Nexstar-Tegna merger last week. The Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery transaction seems destined for approval, too. Not to mention, the NFL-ESPN equity deal was quietly approved nearly a year ahead of schedule<\/a>.<\/p>\n While these mergers do seem \u201cessential\u201d on paper in the context of competing with the likes of Amazon or Google, media consolidation doesn\u2019t exactly have a great track record overall. AOL and Time Warner, Disney and 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros. and Discovery; none of these combinations have made for stronger media companies.<\/p>\n But when the options are merge or deteriorate into obsolescence, the choice becomes pretty clear.<\/p>\n For sports fans, strengthening free-to-air broadcast networks to the point where they can continue competing for sports rights would certainly be welcome in the age of fragmentation. As far as fans are concerned, the more sports that are accessible for free, the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"2026 could very well turn out to be the year of consolidation in legacy media. Already this year,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":46614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[30],"tags":[284540,171,45118,284541,173,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-674680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-curtis-legeyt","tag-entertainment","tag-nab","tag-national-association-of-broadcasters","tag-tv","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116275225997985393","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}