With sports fragmentation, following the fans is crucial

However, every new rights deal in which leagues and teams change distribution channels adds another app, another login and another siloed audience, creating a headache for buyers trying to reach fans at scale. The old sports advertising playbook, organized around rights holders and individual networks, simply doesn’t work anymore.

Why aggregation is a necessity

Every major programmer is staking out their own piece of live sports rights that prioritize their own ecosystem, but what media buyers really need is a platform that puts the pieces back together. Navigating multiple walled gardens to reach the same fan base creates inefficiency and leaves significant incremental reach on the table — especially when sports accounted for 96 of the 100 most-watched shows of 2025.

Fans have a full viewing life across multiple sports rights holders, and advertisers should organize their media plans around meeting them wherever they are. 

National buys alone don’t reach loyal regional and local fans

All sports are tribal — viewers are often devoted to specific teams and players. Regional and local sports programming delivers consistent, highly committed, in-market audiences that span nearly every MLB, NBA, NHL or other fan-favorite league. When a national streamer picks up a league deal, it gets a smattering of the marquee games, but not the deep loyalty of local leagues, the passion and commitment, the regional and civic pride or the community connection that drive the highest engagement.  

Shifting sports rights to streamers has made regional and local sports that much more valuable because fragmentation now makes it much harder for national buys alone to reach these local fans effectively. 

The old system of regional sports networks may be transforming into new, individual league-led channels, but fans will follow their teams wherever they go. A true sports aggregator like DIRECTV is the place to find them, which gives buyers one of the only efficient and effective ways available to reach these highly engaged superfans in the current landscape.

New sports viewing formats and environments 

Innovative ad formats can be a hidden opportunity in live sports. According to research from Magna Media Trials and DIRECTV Advertising, viewers remain more engaged when they hit pause during sports than during general entertainment programming, precisely because they don’t want to miss the big play. 

Pause ads allow advertisers to break through the clutter of traditional 30-second spots and reach fans in peak moments of attention. Not only that, but they are now fully programmatic and transactable from a demand-side platform like any other digital format, making them easier than ever to fit into a sports media plan.

And those media plans also don’t need to end at the household level. Some of the most highly engaged sports viewing happens outside the living room — and bars, restaurants, airplanes and hotels all represent a largely untapped opportunity for advertisers. 

For anyone who’s been in a sports bar or on an airplane during a big game, it’s clear that it is hard to beat that level of communal engagement. And with the DIRECTV Remote DOOH network of commercial establishments, targeted ad insertion into live TV in those environments is now possible.

Programmatic inventory increases access to sports buying 

As sports content becomes increasingly fragmented across leagues, networks and viewing environments, consumers are spread across more touchpoints — and as a result, media buyers must navigate that same fragmentation to effectively reach audiences across the full sports viewing journey. 

For advertisers, purchasing sports media across platforms that aggregate the best of linear and streaming into a single converged ecosystem is one way to solve for sports fragmentation; programmatic convergence is another. 

The programmatic infrastructure now exists to simplify complex cross-media sports buys, with linear streaming, FAST and DOOH TV inventory all now open to programmatic buyers — bringing real-time bidding, private marketplace and programmatic access without having to navigate separate deal structures for each environment. 

As programmatic sports inventory grows and more DSPs gain access, tentpole programming is also becoming attainable for brands with smaller budgets, growing the pool of brands that can get in on the sports action.

There is no doubt that the sports media landscape will continue to fragment. The winning move for advertisers isn’t to chase every new rights deal — it’s to find platforms, formats and buying methods that can aggregate across them. Think of sports buys as a unified audience objective, not a format or platform decision — just follow the fan.

Partner insights from DIRECTV Advertising