Why Finding Live Sports Is Harder Than Ever
Finding the game shouldn’t be a game–but fragmented rights and poor UX are making it one.
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Why Finding Live Sports Is Harder Than Ever
It’s 7:58 PM. Tipoff is in two minutes. Snacks? Check. Couch? Check. Remote? Check. You fire up the TV—only to spend the next seven minutes lost in a labyrinth of apps, blackout restrictions, and paywalls. The game is happening, but instead of watching it, you're hunting for it. Sound familiar? You’re not alone.
Finding the Game Shouldn’t Be a Game
Sports fans love stats, so here’s a big one: 7.4. That’s the average number of different sources fans use to track down content. Throw in device interfaces, and you’re navigating as many as eight different UIs just to find one game. Finding sports on TV used to be easy. Now? It’s a UX nightmare.
And that 7.4 isn’t just a big number—it’s a sign of a bigger problem. Consumers may have hit their limit on how many services they can afford. But it’s not just subscription fatigue—it’s discovery fatigue.
A Triple Threat: Money, Attention, Hassle
Live sports once held pay TV together. Now, big tech and fragmented rights deals have turned sports discovery into a costly chore. Managing multiple subscriptions has always been a headache for scripted content. But for sports fans, if you can’t find the game you want, there’s no substitute.
Sports fans pay for content in three ways: money for the subscription, attention with ads, and the most expensive of all—time spent navigating a maze of service layers just to find the event. And fans are feeling the frustration.
Sports have an unknown outcome, and that’s what makes finding the event while it’s airing live so urgent. The stakes are high, and patience runs thin. When consumers can’t find what they want, they start to wonder if it’s even worth the trouble.
Recent research from Hub confirms the frustration:
69% of avid sports fans say juggling multiple services is a hassle—up 6 points from last year.
61% say finding games is more confusing than ever—up 7 points from last year.
This isn’t just a UX problem—it’s a business risk. If fans can’t find the content, they don’t watch. And if they don’t watch, they unsubscribe. When money, attention, and effort don’t add up, the real threat isn’t just frustration—it’s churn.
Bundling Alone Won’t Fix Churn
Bundling is back, but packaging content isn’t enough when fans are weighing the cost of their time and effort. The calculus is changing: Is it even worth the trouble?
So far this year, only 36% of fans signed up for a new service just to watch a sport—down from 38% in 2024. A small dip, but a clear signal: the market isn’t expanding—it’s plateauing and consolidating.
Fans still want sports. And they say they’ll sign up:
49% of NFL fans would definitely subscribe to a new service for their sport.
46% of NBA and MLB fans say the same.
42% of WNBA fans—often overlooked in subscription trends—are also willing.
But here’s the catch: They’re only willing to subscribe if it makes access simple. Continued fragmentation is risky. Multi-sport fans might start narrowing down to just their favorite sport, while even die-hard fans could decide the cost and hassle just aren’t worth it.
So, what can solve the sports discovery problem?
Better Tech Wasn’t The Answer We’d Hoped
In theory, universal voice search should have been a game-changer for sports discovery. Finding content you’ve paid for and are entitled to watch—no matter how many services you subscribe to—should be a sports fan’s dream functionality.
And yet, while 80% of consumers have access to universal voice search, fewer than 1 in 4 actually use it. Why? Because it was never designed for the way sports fans (aka human beings) actually search.
Ask your remote to “find the Lakers game,” and you’d hope to get the live or upcoming game to surface—whether it’s on broadcast, cable, a league app, or a regional network. Instead, you get everything but the game—clips, replays, talk shows, old documentaries.
The problem? Search algorithms don’t work universally across platforms. They can’t recognize context. Metadata isn’t standardized. And content promotion often takes priority over retrieval.
It’s like walking into a store to buy sneakers, only to have a robot clerk give you a guided tour of the entire mall. Would you ever go back?
That’s what sports discovery feels like today.
There are small steps in the right direction. For instance, ESPN launched their cross-platform guide “Where to Watch” to help people find the live games. And for sure, search functionality has one job: find the game. Just put the Lakers schedule in front of the viewer. Save the “recommended content” for later. Less gratuitous tech, more straightforward utility. But the fact that this even needs to exist proves how broken sports experiences have become.
The Playbook for the Future: Fan First UX
Solving the sports discovery problem isn’t about more content or more tech—it’s about better access to content and a better experience interacting with it. The entire sports media industry needs to embrace Fan First UX—which means looking beyond what fans consume to understand how and why they consume it and how they feel about the entire fan experience. It’s about designing for experience behaviors that are unique to sports fans and using a combination of data and human empathy to create the right tools for consumers.
Sports fans are driven by a unique set of motivations inspired by the games and the athletes themselves. It’s not just about serving up live content or highlight clips in a tray—it’s about presenting that content in the context of how sports competition actually works. Most interfaces are missing that hospitality component of a true fan experience. That’s the real game-changer. And the real opportunity? Smart TVs, connected devices, and OS-level interfaces that actually work for fans.
Imagine a world where:
Your TV knows your teams and surfaces real-time schedules automatically.
Cross-platform search actually works—delivering the game you want, regardless of where it’s streaming.
Highlight clips, recaps, or titles with final scores are hidden until you’ve finished watching. No more spoilers!
Personalized sports hubs let you customize what you see and how you see it, track your fantasy teams, and follow athletes of interest—without algorithms overstepping.
It’s not about throwing more tech at the problem—it’s about making the tech work for fans.
Time to Play Smarter
Thinking like a sports consumer means understanding the value sports brings to people’s lives—why competition feels innate, why viewers live vicariously through winning teams and athletes, and why the anticipation of an unknown outcome creates urgency.
It’s about recognizing how fans identify with sports and sports culture and embracing that culture with technology—not in spite of it. To truly build a great sports platform, you have to be that fan: sitting on the couch with your snacks, trying to find the game, and realizing that hunting for the game is not a very fun game at all.
The platform that figures this out first—prioritizing the fan experience over flashy tech features—will own the future.
Going to These Upcoming Conferences? Come Say Hi 👋🏼
CTAM Think: April 30, 2025 (New York, NY)
Media and entertainment professors from USC and Columbia Business School will each deliver a 20-minute keynote sharing their point of view about the evolving business and thoughts on competing with big tech. Following, Hub’s Jon Giegengack will share consumer behavior research and then moderate a Q&A with the professors.
Streaming Media Connect: May 20-22, 2025 (Virtual)
Highlights First: Gen AI, Gen Z, and Next-Generation Sports Streaming
Thursday, May 22, 10:00am — 11:00am (ET)
As a new generation of highlights-first fans moves into the sports fandom mainstream, sports broadcasters need the agility and tech-savviness to produce and monetize personalized, short-form sports content at scale that meets the experiential demands of Millennial and Gen Z fans. If you’re a sports rights holder and you’re not gaming out how to bring a personalized SportsCenter to every viewer, you’re looking at where the puck was and not where it’s going. This panel of sports streaming tech experts and programming innovators, moderated by Hub’s
, will explore where sports streaming is heading and how we’re going to get there.SubSummit: May 28-29, 2025 (Dallas, TX)
Streaming Smarter: How Creative Bundling Drives Retention and Growth
Thursday, May 29, 3:50pm — 4:15pm (CT)
For nearly a decade now, streaming has focused on audiences independently from other major subscription segments. But as acquisition costs continue to rise and retention strategies begin to stretch thin, bundling is becoming far more common in many different forms. Consumers are now being offered everything from streaming bundles that include Wi-Fi providers, digital apps, and even e-commerce offerings. Learn from this panel of experts, moderated by Hub’s
, how bundling is being approached, what strategies have been successful, and what challenges lay ahead as the streaming landscape continues to evolve.Fans for Life: Turning First-Time Visitors into Loyal Subscribers
Thursday, May 29, 4:45pm — 5:15pm (CT)
In an era of endless options, converting casual visitors into long-term, engaged customers is the key to sustainable success. Whether you're in streaming, e-commerce, or membership-based businesses, retention is everything. On a panel moderated by Hub’s
, leaders from Sling TV, FloSports, and the NBA share how they turn initial engagement into lasting loyalty—offering strategies that apply across industries to keep audiences coming back for more.StreamTV Show: June 11-13, 2025 (Denver, CO)
Debate: What Measurement Matters Now?
Thursday, June 12, 1:35pm —2:20pm (MDT)
Hub’s
Panel: Winning the Family: How Kids Programming Drives Engagement and Loyalty
Friday, June 13, 11:20am—11:55am (MDT)
How does kids’ programming factor into strategies for reducing churn and building family loyalty? How do kids’ viewing habits influence family subscription decisions What innovations in user experience are shaping the way kids and families discover content on your platform? Hub’s
will moderate a discussion.Want More Hub Intel?
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Hub Entertainment Research tracks how technology is changing the way people find, choose, and consume entertainment content: from TV and movies, to gaming, music, podcasts and social video. Working with the largest networks, pay TV operators, streaming providers, and studios, Hub’s studies have covered the most important trends in providers, devices, and technologies since 2013.
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So refreshing to see somebody from the tech side isn’t just OK with navigating through the streaming chaos. Great points here to improve whole process and experience!
Brilliant — and so helpful! Thank you 🤍