Somebody at karaoke on Tuesday asked me, between a rough Whitney Houston and a rougher Toto, which streaming service I would keep if I could only keep one. I said whichever one has the game on. Everybody at the table nodded. Nobody named the same service.
That is the entire streaming business this month, compressed into a sticky booth in Southeast Portland.
Netflix bought NBA rights in July. They have Jake Paul and Mike Tyson booked for November 15 and two NFL games on Christmas Day. Amazon has Thursday nights. Peacock had the Olympics and the playoff game nobody could find. Apple has baseball on Fridays and soccer year round. Everyone arrived at the same conclusion at roughly the same time, which should be the first clue that the conclusion is not a strategy.
Live sports is the only thing left that a streaming service can genuinely sell you, which is precisely why it cannot make any of them different from each other.
Differentiation requires something a competitor cannot also buy. Rights are the most buyable asset in media. They come up on a schedule, they go to the highest bidder, and the bidder changes. Whatever you build your positioning on this year belongs to somebody else in five, and your subscribers will follow it straight out the door, because you spent those five years teaching them that the game is the product and you are just the pipe it arrives through.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms with cable clients, and the pattern is old. You pay a fortune for scarce inventory. The inventory does its job. Churn drops for exactly as long as the season lasts. Then somebody asks what the service is for in July, and the room goes quiet.
What separated the winners in the last era was never the rights. It was the thing wrapped around the rights: the discovery, the studio voice, the reason to open the app on a Tuesday in June when nothing is on. HBO spent thirty years teaching people that three letters meant something before any given show arrived to prove it. That is the asset nobody can outbid you for.
Whatever you build your positioning on this year belongs to somebody else in five.
The uncomfortable version for brand people is that this is not only a media problem. Scarce inventory, celebrity partners, the trending format, the placement everyone is chasing this quarter. All buyable. All temporary. All indistinguishable from what your competitor is buying with the same money and the same agency.
I got home late and Truffles was asleep on the remote, which is roughly the level of loyalty any of these services have earned.