In this exclusive op-ed, Ashton De Santis, senior director of inventory partnerships at The Trade Desk, explains why the $8 billion Australian sports rights market is entering a pivotal moment. He explores how changing viewing habit – from broadcast TV to connected devices – are reshaping how audiences consume sport, and why advertisers must evolve their strategies to turn scale into measurable business outcomes.
Australian broadcasters are spending more than $8 billion securing sports rights. Yet the biggest shift in sport viewing isn’t happening on broadcast TV anymore.
The 2024 AFL Grand Final reached more than 7 million Australians across broadcast and streaming, reinforcing a simple truth: live sport still delivers the biggest national audiences in the country.
But fans aren’t all watching the same way anymore.
Increasingly, Australians are tuning in through streaming apps and connected TVs, particularly younger viewers who have grown up expecting sport to be available on demand and across multiple screens. Today, 35 per cent of Australians watch live sport via connected TV or streaming platforms, rising to over 60 per cent among Gen Z and Millennials.
You could see that shift clearly during this year’s Australian Open Men’s Final, which reached 6.3 million Australians. The real signal wasn’t just the audience size: BVOD viewership surged 135 per cent year-on-year, making it the highest-rated Men’s Final in VOZ history.
Live sport hasn’t lost its scale. But the way Australians experience it has changed, and the industry’s commercial model needs to evolve with it.
Reach is only the beginning
For marketers, the real question isn’t just where audiences are watching sport. It’s what happens when brands appear alongside those moments.
Sport remains one of the most powerful commercial environments in media because it captures attention at scale, in real time. Research shows more than half of Australians are more likely to notice a brand ad alongside their favourite team, athlete or league. Half view brands advertising in sport as more credible, and 43 per cent go on to seek more information about products they encounter during live sporting events.
In other words, sport doesn’t just deliver reach, it drives engagement and intent.
But capturing that value now requires more than simply showing up. Seventy-three per cent of live sport viewers use a second device during a match, checking scores, scrolling social media or messaging friends while the game unfolds.
A linear-only strategy misses much of that attention. To fully capture sport audiences today, brands need omnichannel strategies spanning connected TV, mobile and digital video, meeting fans wherever they are watching.
A pivotal moment for Australian broadcasters
For Australian broadcasters and publishers, the shift in how audiences watch sport creates both opportunity and responsibility.
Billions of dollars have been invested securing the country’s most valuable sporting properties. Ensuring those investments deliver their full potential means evolving the monetisation model alongside changing audience behaviour.
Viewers are increasingly moving fluidly between broadcast, BVOD and connected TV, while advertisers are looking for greater addressability, measurement and performance across those environments. That shift is prompting the industry to rethink how live sport is bought, sold and optimised.
For broadcasters, the opportunity is clear: Turn the country’s most valuable content into the most valuable advertising environment in media.
As the ecosystem evolves, the ability to connect the scale of live sport with the precision and accountability of modern advertising will define the next phase of growth for sports media in Australia.
The technology gap live sport must close
Live sport creates some of the most intense demand spikes in media. Millions of viewers tuning in simultaneously compress enormous attention into moments that last hours, or sometimes minutes.
Much of the industry’s advertising infrastructure was never designed for that kind of pressure.
Latency, fill rates, decisioning speed and budget pacing all need to keep up with the urgency of a live cultural moment. When the technology falls short, brands miss the very moments they’re paying to be part of.
The ecosystem is beginning to evolve. Across Australia, the volume of premium live sport available programmatically has grown significantly in recent years. Platforms such as Kayo Sports are introducing new connected TV ad formats around live sport, while networks are increasingly making premium inventory available through 9Now, 7plus and 10 Play.
On the buy side, new tools are emerging that are built specifically for live events. Platforms such as The Trade Desk’s Kokai enable automated pacing across seasons, unified inventory views for major events and AI-driven decisioning that evaluates thousands of signals per impression to optimise towards business outcomes rather than just delivery.
The impact is already measurable. Nielsen research found connected TV campaigns optimised through advertiser-led decisioning delivered 25 per cent higher sales lift than comparable programmatic guaranteed buys.
Closing the gap between delivery and real business outcomes is exactly what the next generation of live sport advertising technology is designed to do.
What comes next?
Live sport on streaming is no longer emerging inventory. It is premium, addressable connected TV inventory that can increasingly be bought on performance.
A new AFL season is underway, the NFL will stage its first regular-season game at the MCG, and globally sports media rights have now surpassed US$60 billion.
But opportunity alone isn’t enough.
The future of sport advertising lies in combining live sport’s cultural scale with the precision and accountability of modern media technology to measure what was actually delivered – not just audience numbers, but sales lift, brand lift and incrementality.
Because when that happens, something powerful occurs.
A 30-second spot during the footy stops being just a media buy and becomes a measurable business outcome.
