Streaming TV State of Play: March Madness 2025

The days are getting longer (thank you, Daylight Savings) and the nights are getting warmer, but one thing is still keeping us glued to our seats: March Madness is back. 68 teams will battle it out this month starting with Selection Sunday on March 16, and while the chances of filling out a perfect NCAA bracket may be one in 9.2 quintillion (that’s 1:9,223,372,036,854,775,808 for the mathematically inclined) you have much better odds of understanding how this sportsfan favorite is playing out across streaming networks and publishers.

March Madness: Where To Watch, and Who’s Watching?

Take your pick: this year, the men’s games will be streamed on CBS, TBS, TNT, TruTV, and their digital platforms, including Paramount+. Meanwhile, you can watch the Final Four and national title games via CBS. The women’s tournament will be aired on ABC and the ESPN networks. 

Per a consumer report on Numerator, March Madness / college basketball fandom comprises a more mature audience (45+ years), with a higher household income. They’re also more likely to have attended a four-year university and be based in the Midwest and the East South Central U.S.

Their viewing habits were much more telling, however. A research study by S&P Global revealed that March Madness viewership extends way beyond the tournament itself — these same viewers are likely to watch live TV sports several times a week.

The majority of these viewers (64% of men’s NCAA and 62% women’s NCAA) are, unsurprisingly, subscribed to multichannel TV services including cable, premium channels, and streaming. This highlights the fragmentation that continues to define the industry as sports broadcasts are distributed across different networks and providers (more about that later).

March Madness Magic

Disney and “Magic” are two words that go hand-in-hand, but apparently so are Disney and “Sports.” In fact, Disney has the highest sports rights value, with 7.2 billion U.S. dollars or 28 percent of all sports rights, with an impressive lineup under its belt, including the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and college sports. We’ve charted how sports rights are divided up between the broadcasters  below; you could say it’s a close race between second (FOX) and third place (Comcast).

Where’s Netflix in this lineup, you ask? In January this year, the streaming giant made their sports debut by offering WWE programming last month. And rumor has it that they’re zeroing in on rights deals for F1 and UFC.

It’s no wonder why everyone’s scrambling in on sports. “[With scripted programs] you don’t know whether it’s a success or not,” David Levy, Horizon Sports and Experiences co-CEO, told Yahoo! Finance. “You know sports is going to be successful. They have built-in fan bases.”

Fragmentation: Still the Future of Sports Streaming?

Streaming networks’ total global spend on sports rights have more than doubled over the past four years, amounting to a hefty $12.5 billion. 

It’s also a beacon of hope for legacy linear TV networks, thanks to the high viewership offered by sports content. Meanwhile, as the first chart in this article suggests, fragmentation on sports streaming isn’t going away any time soon, if NFL games simulcast on three different streaming platforms are any proof of that. 

Some networks have nevertheless accepted the challenge. Last year, Disney’s ESPN announced a “Where to Watch” feature, a proprietary database of sports events and the networks and where they can be accessed — be it broadcast, cable, regional sports networks, or streaming. Fans can filter by league or based on where the game is available (i.e. ESPN+, Peacock, Fox, etc), and search for events. The goal is to aid discoverability and become the default go-to for sports fans — whether they are subscribed to the DTC ESPN streaming service or not. 

2025’s Sports Streaming Trend: DTC

Fragmentation may have its challenges, but it’s also resulted in new ways of content distribution. Sports leagues like the NBA, NHL, and NFL are exploring DTC to better connect with their fans. It gives them a “one-stop shop” to deliver personalized, interactive content and engage with specific demographics, as well as integrate merchandising, sponsorship, and ticket sales.  

This move seems to be working so far. Warner Bros. Discovery last week announced a $677 million DTC Profit for 2024, and quarterly profit of $409 million for its DTC unit. But the question remains whether this trend will exacerbate the fragmentation issue at hand. CEO David Zaslav foresees a “re-bundling” in the future to meet viewers’ expectations: “There will be an aggregation in a meaningful way behind a couple of the bigger global players, because consumers at some point are going to say, ‘This is too cumbersome and too challenging, and I just want to put the TV on,’ or, ‘I want to go to my phone, or whatever device I go to and be able to see the content I love, without having to come in and out of products and without googling where things are.’

Where to From Here?

While market fragmentation continues to exist for both March Madness and the overall live sports landscape, savvy publishers and networks are seeing this as an opportunity to come up with new strategies to capture their audience. And with networks battling it out for sports rights — to the point that sports leagues rights are now split up between multiple players — it’s clear that streaming content might be king, but it’s sports content that’s dominating the kingdom.