Streaming Sports Surges: Rising Viewership and Network Demand in 2019

In an era where appointment television is largely a relic—except for high‑profile shows like Game of Thrones—fans still go out of their way to catch live broadcasts of their favorite teams and athletes.

At AppNeta, we witnessed this firsthand during the 2019 Masters Tournament. As Tiger Woods approached his first major title in over a decade, employees in our Boston office streamed the opening rounds on a range of devices—from TVs to laptops, tablets and smartphones—captured in the Usage Chart below.

Streaming today hinges on both bandwidth and speed. Leading platforms deploy Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) or reduce the physical distance between their servers and viewers. In our analysis, Akamai dominated the traffic, accounting for nearly as much network capacity as all our standard business applications combined. We verified this by targeting https://www.masters.com to identify the ASN and DNS‑resolved IP address over time.

While the team continued to work productively throughout the day, the disproportionate usage illustrates how multi‑device engagement with live sports strains network resources.

The trend is clear: fans consume sporting events across multiple platforms and devices. One may watch "March Madness" on an HDTV, place a bet on a laptop, stream an alternate feed on a phone, and participate in a live fan forum on a tablet—all simultaneously demanding bandwidth.

The appetite for premium content is reflected in spending patterns. Deltatre’s recent report shows fans spend five times more on sports streaming than on Netflix. Consequently, global sports distributors allocate 15% of their budgets to streaming, while U.S. operators are projected to invest over $6.8 billion in OTT technology by 2021.

From 2017 to 2018, the report found, the total number of minutes spent streaming sports rose 53 percent, while the number of paying subscribers jumped 24 percent year‑over‑year.

With lucrative revenue streams and a demand for live viewership that scripted shows cannot match, sports streaming services are set to expand. As more viewers cut the cord, they bring their subscriptions into workplaces, enabling fans to watch from the office rather than a bar or home.

This shift does not justify monitoring employees’ personal streaming usage, but it does underline the need for IT and network operations teams to scrutinize application performance during marquee events like the Masters.

Network managers should monitor all traffic—including non‑critical apps—to fully understand capacity utilization and prevent non‑essential traffic from impacting core services.

A comprehensive monitoring solution that delivers granular visibility with minimal performance overhead is essential.