How has TV viewing of the Olympics changed over the past decade with the introduction of the streamers, and how do you expect it to continue during the 2020s?
Considering how the IOC’s sale of media rights for the Olympics has evolved over the last decade, it’s clear that the provision of the Games on public service broadcasters (PSBs) has been diluted but maintains an important role. Back in 2016, 100 per cent of the rights were held by PSBs. This changed in 2018 with the entrance of Eurosport, now owned by Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) and as of the 2026-2032 rights cycle for the Games, European markets will see rights shared between PSBs and WBD (via the EBU and WBD’s joint agreement with the IOC, with WBD’s rights covering Eurosport, TNT Sports, Discovery+ and HBO Max).
While the hours of coverage available on PSBs are now far lower than those of WBD’s services (per the IOC, EBU members would broadcast more than 200 hours of coverage of the Summer Games and at least 100 hours of the Winter Games on TV; by comparison, WBD broadcast 3800 hours of coverage across its portfolio in the UK for the 2024 Summer Games), reach remains impressive: 36 million viewers reported by the BBC for the Paris Olympics, almost 60 million by France Télévisions, 32 million by Spain’s RTVE, 53 million by Germany’s ARD/ZDF, with WBD reporting 215 million viewers Europe-wide across all of its linear channels and streaming services.
Going into the 2026 Games and beyond, linear TV is likely to keep attracting huge audiences for national moments and more casual fans, while WBD’s streaming offer provides total breadth of events for hardcore fans of those events and people who want to discover what’s going on away from the curated TV schedule events.
What impact do you think the launch of HBO Max across much of Europe is likely to have on the Games’ audience?
Looking back at the 2024 Olympics, the impact on WBD’s subscriber numbers is clear. Excluding the services’ relative launch years, Q3 2024 saw Discovery+’s largest quarter-on-quarter percentage increase in subs (with the Games running through July and August) in both Germany and Italy, and its second highest in the UK. Likewise, excluding launch years, Max (later HBO Max) saw its largest quarterly growth in subs in Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and Sweden.
With that in mind, I’d consider the streamers’ impact on viewership across Europe to be material. However, if we take a step back and consider overall penetration rates of the services, they are unlikely to supplant broadcast TV or BVoD audiences. By year-end 2025, HBO Max and Discovery+’s reach across major European markets significantly lagged behind pay TV penetration, which is the main mode of distribution for Eurosport in all European markets outside the UK, and while Olympics fans over-index for their uptake, the discrepancy still holds. Eurosport, outside of the UK, is therefore available to a larger pool of consumers, with PSB channels and BVoD available to everyone for free.
It’s also worth noting that per Ampere’s survey of sports fans, across the big five European markets plus Sweden and Poland, just a quarter of Olympics fans say they prefer to watch live sport via streaming than broadcast TV, compared to over a third of sports fans on average—so linear is still the go-to medium for most fans.
How has the emergence of the streamers impacted public service broadcasters in Europe?
Firstly, self-reported daily viewing data from Ampere’s consumer research reveals that across Europe, linear TV viewing time fell by 45 per cent between Q3 2017 and Q3 2025, while subscription OTT viewing nearly trebled, and free online video (eg YouTube, TikTok, etc) more than doubled. On average during this time, the monthly active user base of the ‘big 5’s’ PSBs fell by around a third. This has impacted both revenue and, in turn, constrained the ability to grow content spend.
The TV advertising arms of Germany, Italy, and the UK’s PSBs (excluding the BBC) saw revenues fall by 26 per cent on average from 2016-2025, with only France’s PSB growing ad revenues in light of a softer overall decline in linear viewing. While some have managed to offset this by growing BVoD revenues, in real terms overall revenue has fallen. As SVoD’s share of viewership and content spend has grown, public and commercial broadcasters have seen their share of content spend across TV, film and sport fall from 43 per cent of all spend in 2016 to 17 per cent in 2025, highlighting the intense competition they now face in attracting viewers.
What are the biggest trends you’re seeing in the way viewers watch live sport?
The growth in streamers’ investment in sports rights has changed the European landscape: in 2016 streaming accounted for <1 per cent of all sports rights; in 2026, based on deals currently agreed, this has grown to 17 per cent.
That said, for coverage which is split by buyers across mediums or across a single broadcaster’s linear and streaming offers, per Ampere’s Sports Consumer survey, linear services typically still surpass digital channels. In the UK, for instance, 45 per cent of sports fans reported watching Sky Sports in the month prior to fieldwork, versus 5 per cent for Now Sports (Sky’s sister streaming service). Even in markets where a streamer shares major rights with a linear broadcaster, the latter usually attracts more subscribers (eg in Spain, Movistar+ leading DAZN, with the two sharing LaLiga rights). That said, in some cases streamers have taken over as the leading broadcasters, such as DAZN for Serie A in Italy—though in many of its markets DAZN has also launched linear channels, recognising the importance of being present across mediums.
The live aspect remains the largest viewing driver for audiences, with just over three hours of live sport watched per week by the average fan, though demand for other ancillary content and formats are coming to the fore more than ever before, and we’re seeing both services and rightsholders respond. For example, over half of sports fans in Europe watch influencers doing watch-alongs or analysing games, Mark Goldbridge gets the rights to the Bundesliga in the UK, Sky introduces a ‘stories’ format for near-live clips, and so on. Stats overlays, e-commerce and betting integration are also more in demand, with broadcasters evolving their offer—nearly a third of sports fans say they are interested in such integration with the live platform.
It’s also important to note the huge presence of piracy in the landscape – half of sports fans in Europe admit to pirating monthly, with rights fragmentation and costs two of the key drivers.
In what way might the Olympics have an impact on other content?
WBD’s partnership with TikTok for the Winter Olympics is a continuation of a trend developing rapidly across the media space, being the hunt for engagement with vertical video formats on mobile (see also, Netflix, Disney and others rolling out the format). Consider that 18-34s in Europe’s big 5 markets spend over an hour a day watching video content on smartphones (longer than on any other device), and 90 per cent of sports fans that age watch clips and highlights on social media (vs 71 per cent of all sports fans), exclusive mobile-first content has become more important than ever, and the Olympics is set to drive this further. If the 2024 Summer Games are anything to go by, we can expect innovative content and formats to emerge which are eminently clippable and shareable, such as NBC’s deal with Snoop Dogg as an influencer/pundit providing viral content, and AI-powered ‘Matrix-style’ 3D reconstructions of key moments.
Video podcasts are another trending format, with Netflix introducing a slate of sports podcasts this year (including with Gary Lineker’s The Rest is Football for the 2026 FIFA World Cup), and social video services seeing high engagement with the format (17 per cent of sports fans in Europe watch podcasts and clips). It will be interesting to see how Olympics-focused podcasts fare throughout the Winter Games.
