It began with the latest blockbuster movies at a fixed monthly fee, before full seasons of the most recent TV shows were available at the touch of a finger and now, streaming services have added the latest live sports programming to their schedule, pulling audiences further away from the cable TV and free-to-air viewing model that has dominated the home entertainment space for the last 70 years.
From the latest wrestling matches, American NFL (National Football League) football games to NBA (National Basketball Association) basketball matches, streamers such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are putting the smackdown on cable and free TV models, scoring heavily against a traditional linear TV viewing model that has seen diminishing audiences in the last decade.
Since January 2025, Netflix has been showing the latest WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) matches, from NXT, Raw, SmackDown and Survivor Series for global audiences, with the only catch that audiences around the world have to deal with being the time difference in the US. For fans of American football, the world’s biggest streamer has been showing NFL games since acquiring the rights for NFL games in 2017 and come Christmas, international audiences can revel in the American tradition of watching football during the holiday season, with Dallas Cowboys vs. Washington Commanders, and Detroit Lions vs. Minnesota Vikings games both available live on Christmas 2025… in US time that is.
Meanwhile, Amazon Prime. Video has been flexing its strength with the NBA, making live NBA and WNBA games available since 2022, which are currently in their 79th and 29th seasons, respectively.
In recent years, this availability has grown globally, as more international audiences get to enjoy the best of American live sports, mostly without paying extra for cable TV add-ons for sports shows. While most live sporting broadcasts on streaming platforms are currently limited to the US or Europe, things are gradually heading across the ocean to APAC, backed by the rise in the region’s live sports streaming market.
Netflix, for example, recently announced its first-ever live sports event from APAC as part of an exclusive media rights partnership with World Baseball Classic, Inc. (WBCI), where it will deliver live coverage of the World Baseball Classic exclusively in Japan in 2026. It also announced that the next two FIFA Women’s World Cup tournaments will stream exclusively on Netflix in the US and Canada. Similarly, Prime Video has also brought the NBA to India with the launch of the NBA League Pass in October 2025, as an add-on subscription to the service.
The goal of course, is for streamers to dominate the TV consumption trend as it has done in the US, where consumption of streaming content has outpaced that of linear TV and cable, as a recent study found that 60 per cent of all TV time in the United States was consumed via streaming in 2025.
Meanwhile, live broadcasting, and live sports in particular, still remains a strong draw for linear TV viewership, with massive live events like the Super Bowl garnering huge audiences year by year. With this in mind, it’s no wonder that streamers are starting to recognise the potential of the live format, especially since it can be a highly lucrative market. The global Live Streaming for Sports Market, for example, has seen significant growth this year at US$36.99 billion, compared to 2024’s US$27.93 billion, and is projected to rise even further to US$350 billion by 2033.
In a way, offering live-broadcast options alongside their usual services means streamers can provide the best of both worlds, and this shift, although gradual, signifies a growing global trend of live TV being brought over to streaming services, and it’s not just about sports alone, as streamers are dipping their toes further into the world of live reality TV, bringing live entertainment, concerts and potentially, live-voting to a global audience.
Netflix started with its first live event with the Chris Rock stand-up comedy special in March 2023, before moving into The Roast of Tom Brady, which originally aired live in May 2024, followed by the November 2024 live boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul, and the rematch fight between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano in July this year.
The streamer, with a reported 310 million global subscriber base, also recently announced its revival of Star Search, the popular talent show from the ‘80s and ‘90s responsible for kicking off the careers of icons like Beyoncé, Britney Spears and Dave Chappelle. In addition to the reboot, the streamer will also debut real-time voting for its contestants, introducing that element of interactivity that traditional TV can’t provide. Due to the nature of voting, it’s highly likely that, like most live programs on the platform, Star Search will be region-locked to the Americas or the EMEA, but that could potentially change in the future.
When contacted, both Netflix and Amazon declined to provide any comments on its live broadcast push in APAC or SEA due to the infancy of its live programming journey in this region, but Netflix’s CTO (Chief Technology Offier), Elizabeth Stone, recently spoke about the streamer’s live content plans during TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, explaining that it is “expanding on both content types and in business models so that [it has] more to offer to members” while making the streaming experience more personalised, interactive and immersive.
Still, Stone noted that live content was still just a small part of the streamer’s overall line-up, and that it served as a “complementary relative to the video on demand”.
In the same vein, Prime Video has made its mark on the live performance space with Amazon Music Live, the streamer’s annual music showcase series. Available only in select regions, the series features performances from some of the biggest artists, with its latest season, which premiered on 23 October this year, featuring acts like K-pop sensation Aespa, American rock band Foo Fighters, genre-bending rapper Shaboozey, and Mexican band Fuerza Regida.
With streaming platforms adding the live TV notch on their belts, where does that leave traditional television?
It’s safe to say that TV will never truly die as long as there are people around the world with limited to no access to the internet, but as the more tech-savvy generation slowly takes over, and as streamers like Netflix or Prime Video steadily gain the upper hand by providing a service once exclusive to the traditional platform, there’s a chance that linear TV, including cable, is fast seeing the end credits roll a lot quicker, especially under the live spotlight.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
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