At the Upfronts, Sports Sideline Scripted TV as Studios Lean In to Live Events

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At the Upfronts, Sports Sideline Scripted TV as Studios Lean In to Live Events

Alex Weprin

Thu, May 15, 2025 ·

6 min read

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In the glory days of the TV upfronts, the broadcast networks would build up to a big reveal: The schedule release.

The fall schedule would be revealed, and media buyers could get a glimpse of what show would get that prized Friends or CSI lead-in.

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In 2025, the upfronts still build up to a schedule release, but it isn't a fall lineup: It's an NFL game.

The only connective tissue between this year's upfronts, from NBCUniversal and Fox to Disney , YouTube and Netflix was sports, and the NFL in particular, with every company using their presentation to reveal an upcoming matchup that advertisers will want to buy into. Netflix and YouTube each had NFL commissioner Roger Goodell make the reveals himself (though only Netflix made him wear a Santa Claus-esque coat).

NBCUniversal used its event to tout the return of the NBA on NBC, bringing out John Tesh for a live orchestral performance of "Roundball Rock," and stunning the crowd with the news that Michael Jordan would join the broadcast team, or as Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon quipped: "Good morning. I'm glad to be at the NBA upfront, I mean, the NBC upfront."

Later that day, Fox featured Tom Brady, Derek Jeter, Michael Strahan, Josef Newgarden and David Ortiz on stage in a heavy sports push. Since selling its entertainment assets to Disney, Fox has built its business around sports and news, while strategically committing to some entertainment fare.

The Walt Disney Co. opened its upfront with Super Bowl rivals Patrick Mahomes and Saquon Barkley, who were joined by Disney CEO Bob Iger on stage in an event that also featured a heavy dose of the Manning brothers, as well as Jason Kelce, New York Knicks legends and other athletes and ESPN personalities.

"How about those New York Knicks? I think there are more athletes here than there were at the game last night," ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel quipped in his annual upfront roast. "So much sports. This is all sports. What happened? We used to be so gay."

Netflix has only been in the live sports space for a couple of years, but chose to end its 2025 upfront with Goodell, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, and a live performance from the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

"Live sports grab our attention, they pull us in, give us something to talk about, and sometimes fight about, and nothing brings us together quite like the NFL," Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria told the crowd.

And at YouTube, sports creator iShowSpeed announced a new series on stage, while Goodell revealed that the Los Angeles Chargers would face the Kansas City Chiefs in YouTube's first ever exclusive game, to be played in Brazil later this year.

Even Warner Bros. Discovery, which is losing its live NBA rights, leaned into sports in its event, highlighting the upcoming French Open and its slate of NHL and college sports.

"While our portfolio of rights has changed, our sports DNA remains the same," TNT Sports chif Luis Silberwasser told the crowd.

The NFL is in particularly high demand, as the schedule releases and Goodell appearances underscore. The league, which is obsessed with maximizing the reach of its games, and growing the sport globally, spent quite a bit of time thinking about this season's streaming event games, from Amazon's Black Friday and Christmas Day primetime games, to Netflix's Christmas Day games, to YouTube's first ever exclusive game.

"As we think about going on to new platforms, going on to platforms that are already widely scaled, that have big NFL audiences on them already, like a Netflix, like an Amazon, like now YouTube, there's already wide reach of those platforms, and we think the NFL going onto those platforms could be a real win-win," says Hans Schroeder, the executive VP and COO of NFL Media, adding of Christmas 2025: "Hopefully that may be the biggest streaming day in history, with three NFL games and marquee matchups throughout the day."

There's an understandable logic behind the decision to lean into sports, according to multiple top ad executives from both the buy side and the sell side. And it's not just the fact that only the NFL could credibly claim to generate "the biggest streaming day in history."

"In the really highly coveted opportunities, like sports and tentpoles, where it's highly coveted inventory, that price will continue to either hold or increase," a top media buyer told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the upfronts, underscoring the scarce supply and enormous audiences live sports provide.

Or as Rita Ferro, Disney's head of ad sales, told reporters at an ESPN briefing this week: "the reason advertisers continue to show up a is very, very simple. The numbers prove it. It's the content."

Or as John Halley, Paramount's ad sales chief told THR : "there's a clear focus on sports and tentpoles, which deliver cultural experiences … advertisers are scrutinizing every dollar, and they're demanding measurable impact, and the impetus is on us to to provide that."

So Disney is already beginning to tout 2027, when it will have the Super Bowl, the College Football Playoffs and events like the Oscars and Grammys in a three month window, and NBCUniversal is selling 2026, when it will have the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics and NBA playoffs.

Entertainment, on the other hand, is now increasingly an on-demand game, a format made for programmatic buying and scatter market bargains. Multiple sources say that media companies are trying to tie some entertainment buying alongside their sports, with a heavy emphasis on streaming commitments, though how successful that proves to be remains to be seen.

And then there is the cold, hard fact that, at least on broadcast TV, networks are strategically replacing entertainment hours with live sports hours, with NBC alone replacing more than 150 hours of entertainment programming with NBA games, and Disney also adding more NBA and WNBA games to ABC.

And Disney is adding more NFL games too. Last year's schedule release had five Monday night games on ABC. This year's schedule doubles that to 10. And the NFL is giving ESPN more Mondays with two games happening at once, as well as doubleheaders.

"The media landscape has changed a ton, and ESPN has seen a bunch of change throughout their portfolio of assets," says Schroeder. "They came back with a proposal, and wanted to continue to add those simulcasts. We think it's a great way to drive a bigger audience and engage more of our fans."

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