There’s a hint of irony in this week’s news that Warner Bros. Discovery is bringing live sports to Max as an optional add-on.
With B/R Sports, subscribers will get the same live sports coverage that airs on Warner’s cable channels, such as TNT and TBS. That includes playoff baseball, basketball, and hockey, plus every March Madness game that doesn’t air on CBS. Max itself starts at $10 per month, and live sports will be included from October 5 through February 29, 2024, at which point it’ll cost $10 per month extra.
This is the inverse of how pay TV bundling has always worked. In most cable packages, everyone bears the cost of live sports, and premium entertainment channels such as HBO are optional. With Max, Warner has flipped things around so HBO is at the core and live sports coverage is the luxury. That’s the way it should be.
Why Max’s sports tier matters
To understand how big of a deal B/R Sports is, consider how careful most other companies have been to avoid a complete unbundling of their sports coverage:
- Disney does not offer live streams of ABC without a big pay TV package, and a standalone ESPN streaming service might be years away. (ESPN+ is separate, and most of its content isn’t on cable.)
- Fox is committed to the TV bundle and does not sell subscriptions to local Fox stations or Fox Sports channels.
- NBC offers select sporting events exclusively on Peacock (along with local NBC feeds in its $10-per-month tier), but still reserves some sports coverage for cable channels such as USA and the Golf Channel.
- The regional sports situation is a total mess, with some teams offering standalone streaming access and others not. (Bankruptcy for the owner of Bally Sports hasn’t helped.)
By contrast, Warner is offering full parity between its cable channels and Max’s B/R Sports add-on. It’s not making any sports coverage exclusive to Max, nor is it withholding any coverage just to prop up its cable channels.
For sports fans, this should be a refreshing change. Streaming so far has been a terrible experience, in large part because fans need expensive pay TV packages plus an array of streaming services to follow their favorite teams and leagues. It’s only gotten worse as tech companies such as Apple and Amazon have entered the fray with their own piecemeal exclusives.
Max’s B/R Sports tier doesn’t solve this problem on its own, but it at least brings sports fans closer to being able to abandon pay TV bundles outright. If you just want to watch March Madness, for instance, Max’s B/R Sports tier and Paramount+ will have you covered at a much lower price than any pay TV package. And if you’re a casual basketball or hockey fan, Max’s 65 regular season NBA games and 60 NHL games might be good enough.
Yes, it’ll cost extra
Warner’s streaming sports play is unique not just for its parity with cable, but for its positioning as a premium add-on.
With traditional pay TV service, every subscriber helped chip in on live sports whether they watched or not. That model worked well when few alternatives existed, but as the cost of pay TV increases—in part because of exploding costs for sports rights—those who don’t care about sports are opting out, and the model is collapsing.
As of now, no one’s agreed on what to do about it. Paramount+ and Peacock have made live sports part of their core offerings, but at prices that will likely be unsustainable in the long run. Disney offers ESPN+ as a standalone streaming service, allowing it to spend lavishly on sports rights without affecting the cost of Hulu and Disney+. Fox, meanwhile, seems to be hoping that this whole cord-cutting thing will just blow over.
Warner’s approach is comparatively more logical: It assumes you’ll want some general entertainment via the core Max offering. But live sports rights don’t come cheap, and if you want access, you’ll have to pay the price. At last, it’s the sports fans who help shoulder the cost for everyone else.
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Author: Jared Newman
Jared Newman has been helping folks make sense of technology for over a decade, writing for PCWorld, TechHive, and elsewhere. He also publishes two newsletters, Advisorator for straightforward tech advice and Cord Cutter Weekly for saving money on TV service.