Solving sports churn: the home screen advantage in modern streaming

After years of thriving with original programming, licensed TV shows and big-name movies, the world of streaming has become a prime destination for sports. Combined with the sports on traditional TV, fans have more to cheer for than ever before.

In this new era, however, fans often struggle to find the games they’re looking for. 

Unlike most TV shows, where viewers can typically watch all episodes with a single subscription, watching a specific team or league throughout a single season can be far more complicated.

There are many implications of the growing fragmentation of sports rights across channels and services, but the user experience should be top of mind for publishers looking to maximize fan engagement. Here, they should be focused on two key considerations:

• Fans report increasing difficulty finding the games they want to watch.
• Churn rates for sports subscriptions are higher than they are for general entertainment services.

Centralized sports hubs can alleviate fragmentation frustrations

While the glut of services and content poses challenges for all TV viewers, the live, real-time nature of sports programming presents more nuanced challenges for fans, especially at game time. Here, the time it takes to find a game has the potential to reduce the amount of the game a fan gets to see.

And in more extreme cases, difficulty finding a game can mean missing it altogether.

On average, 26.1% of fans say they’re always or often unable to find a specific game or event they’re looking for. Among fans 18-34, the percentage is 35.6%.

Unlike some challenges, connecting fans with the games and content they’re looking for is fairly straightforward. Centralized sports hubs that deliver real-time stats, scores and updates, along with localized broadcast information and cross-platform streaming links, eliminate discovery hurdles and allow publishers to protect subscription revenue, boost ad revenue and build long-term viewer loyalty.

Showcase more of what fans want to combat subscription churn

While a bad user experience can cause a viewer to cancel a subscription, an array of other factors affect churn rates for sports subscriptions, including seasonality and regional blackouts.

Along with the splintered distribution for individual teams and leagues, these factors contribute to higher churn rates among sports services than general entertainment subscriptions. According to subscription analysis firm RetentionCheck, monthly churn rates for sports streamers average 7.2%, compared with 6.3% for general streaming services.

Publishers can’t control the seasonality of sports leagues or which teams make the playoffs, but they can fill in the gaps with other programming that isn’t subject to seasonality. And more importantly, fans are interested in more than just live competitions.

Globally, 77% of fans watch sports-related programming (e.g., highlights, commentary, analyses). And perhaps more importantly, more than 70% say sports-related programming, including pre- and post-game commentary, is important to them.

As with helping solve content discovery as sports rights fragments, keeping audiences engaged in the off season is fairly simple, largely because publishers continue investing in sports programming. Here, the key is ensuring that audiences have quick and easy access to it.

As of July 2026, sports programming accounted for just under 5% of the content offered by the six global subscription video services¹ tracked in the Gracenote Data Hub. For context, that’s about half the amount of movies they offer. And perhaps more relevant for off-season engagement, more than 52% of that content is sports-related programming. The same is true across free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels, where sports programming has increased 37% over the past year.

The fragmentation of sports broadcasting rights has turned tuning in to the game into a part-time job. And sports fans want more than just the game: They want the related programming, scores, stats, analyses and highlights too, and they’re willing to pay for it. 

Given the immense, unwavering appeal of sports programming, centralizing everything that fans are looking for—and localizing it on a home screen—could be the difference between context-switching churn and fostering long-term engagement.

For additional insights, download our 2026 sports report.

Note

1. Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Disney+, HBO Max, Netflix and Paramount+