Streamers turn to live sports
• Netflix hopes to win hearts with Nadal-Alcaraz match
With streaming companies wanting to increase their audiences and entice new subscribers in a highly competitive environment, it’s logical that they’ve begun to look to the big, wide world of sports as a potentially profitable and popular drawcard.
In SA, Showmax has used its exclusive rights to the English Premier League as a major incentive for new subscribers, while other international streamers like Amazon and Netflix have begun to experiment with live broadcasts and sports documentaries as a means of expanding their subscriber bases.
In January it was announced that wrestling giant WWE had signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Netflix that will result in its flagship show Monday Night Raw moving from terrestrial television to the streaming service from 2025.
On Sunday, Netflix will stream The Netflix Slam, an exhibition match between Spanish tennis legend Rafael Nadal and new heir to the thrown Carlos Alcaraz, live from Las Vegas to its hundreds of millions of subscribers in 190 countries around the world.
Gabe Spitzer, vice-president of nonfiction sports at Netflix, says that while the streamer ’ s live programming initiative “is still in its early stages”, Netflix is “excited with what we’ve done so far”.
The event makes sense for Spitzer, who was approached by the MGM Group in Las Vegas in 2023 after the match was cancelled and moved to 2024 to come on board as the broadcast home for the event. “Obviously, with Nadal being a legend in the sport and Alcaraz a prodigy coming up,” Spitzer believes the event will be “a perfect matchup both for our audiences in Spain and around the world”.
He adds that while the event is an exhibition match, “we’re really excited that they’ve only played three times before and not for a couple of years ... You really can’t guarantee that maybe you’ll see them at Indian Wells or the Madrid Open, so we feel really good about that.
“We’re really just weighing what entertainment we can bring to our audience and we hope that they enjoy it.”
Spitzer, who previously served as Netflix’s director of documentary series and has many years of experience in the arena of sports documentary production, believes the service’s other sports-related shows — like Formula One: Drive to Survive, the golf docuseries Full Swing and the recent Beckham biography series — prove that “for us sports is drama; sports is great storytelling, so I think if we’re only serving the core superfan of the sport, we’re failing in a way”.
He sees Netflix’s future sports strategy as aiming to attract not just “core sports fans, and that’s been the exciting part and the amazing part of Netflix and the reach that we have in 190 countries around the world — that we can create new fans along the way as well”.
He also acknowledges that sports is a broad church, where “each country has its own fandoms and the people they love”.
“But I think that what’s been exciting for us ... [is, for example,] Formula One, which is huge in many countries around the world [but] was fairly small in terms of fandom but growing in the US, and Drive to Survive has shown that you can take a sport that some people may not know much about and create new fans ...
“I think that’s always our goal. It starts with a story first and we hope that we serve fans in local countries, but also that we’re creating new fans around the world.”
Though Spitzer can’t divulge too many details about what may be in the pipeline on the live front, he does see events like The Netflix Slam becoming an increasing part of the slate in the future, even if for now the emphasis is more on “shoulder programming ”— like the upcoming docuseries focusing on Spain’s La Liga, the Tour de France and the forthcoming Olympic Games in Paris.
“At this point, we’re really just interested in sports shoulder programming and really trying to highlight the drama of those sports, so we have no plans at this point to get into live sports rights,” says Spitzer.
As for what viewers can expect from The Netflix Slam on Sunday, Spitzer hopes the carefully planned event will ultimately be “a great, entertaining tennis broadcast and we hope that people come, whether they’re fans of Nadal and Alcaraz individually or tennis fans or just sports fans tuning in on a Sunday from around the world. We just want them to enjoy the match and be entertained along the way.”
He won’t say how much Netflix has committed to its sports strategy or what the company’s internal expectations are with regard to The Slam and its potential for increasing subscriber numbers, but Spitzer stresses that Netflix is “just hoping to put on an exciting live event. In terms of the visuals, whether you’re watching or you’re there, the production team has put together something that feels really special and visually very exciting. People can expect something that’s fun and entertaining, but is also real, competitive tennis between Nadal and Alcaraz.”
● ‘The Netflix Slam’ will stream live on Netflix this Sunday at 10.30pm.