There were a couple of bits of news over the last week or so that have continued a trend that seems to have only grown in recent years – the disappearance of live sport from free-to-air TV.

First came news that Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) has signed an exclusive deal with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to continue to offer access to Amaury Sport Organisation’s (ASO) cycling events including the Tour de France from 2026 until 2030. In particular, those rights will be exclusive to WBD in the UK. That means that ITV will no longer offer free-to-air coverage on ITV4 as it has done for the last 25 years. Note that next year’s 2025 Tour de France should still be on ITV4.

This came off the back of a separate agreement between the EBU and ASO to continue to offer rights to those events to its members between 2026 and 2030.

This does all get a little complicated, because across a number of territories in Europe, local free-to-air rights will continue to be made availabl;e EBU members. And of course, in France, France Télévisions actually produces the expensively made production, with all the camera bikes, helicopters and planes that are required to keep the show on the road. In France, the Tour must be made available on free-to-air under their local broadcasting law.

Furthermore, ITV, like the BBC, is a member of the EBU. STV in Scotland and Welsh language channel S4C are also both members. Indeed the latter also offers live Tour de France coverage in Welsh. So why don’t all members get access to programming via Eurovision?

It doesn’t really work that, because on that basis, ITV would be able to also show the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in addition to the BBC.

At this point, my knowledge comes up short. I believe that for events like the ESC to which the EBU holds collective rights, partner broadcasters who take those rights share the costs of them, not equally, but reflecting other things like the size of their market. For example, it has long been known that the BBC pays more for its share of ESC costs than many smaller nations, but in return gets the UK entry a guaranteed place in the final.

On the other hand, I suspect that the BBC is not putting much money into coverage of many winter sports that the EBU collectively agrees rights for. So EBU member broadcasters with an interest in those sports share the costs of those rights for live coverage etc. The BBC just paying a smaller amount for some minimal rights – enough to be able to make Ski Sunday.

(As an aside – Eurosport was originally created and owned by the EBU as somewhere to house all its various sporting rights – especially when not every member was taking the full selection available.)

According to new reporting from Deadline, ITV declined to make a bid for continued rights. And no other broadcaster such as the BBC stepped in to make an offer (I suspect in the BBC’s case because The Tour overlaps with Wimbledon which would lead to a pile-up of sports rights). There may be a view that British cycling’s recent peak of Bradley Wiggins – Chris Froome – Mark Cavendish – Geraint Thomas has dissipated, even though there are many more British riders cycling professionally and with young guns like Tom Pidcock and Cat Ferguson coming along, that’s likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

But WBD ended up with all the rights. That same Deadline article notes that WBD is considering what it might do with highlights. And it is worth noting that on occasion, it has made an hour-long highlights package available on Quest, it’s free-to-air channel which in the past has also been home to Football League highlights when the then Discovery-owned channel had the rights.

The only thing I’d note is that the Quest offering can be a bit bare-bones, missing many of the on-the-ground features that ITV produces. Rider interviews and so-on tend to be reserved for Eurosport viewers. There’s also the question of tone. Eurosport’s coverage is aimed at the existing cycling fan. They offer a very full package of most races globally, but you’re likely to already be a sports fan, and a cycling fan in particular. ITV’s offering was much more of an entry-point. They had to tread a fine-line of explaining the sport to a novice, whilst not pandering to an existing and knowledgeable cycling fanbase. A significant part of the audience may be just as interested in scenic helicopter shots of castles, chateaus and mountains, as watching some cyclists. My mother, during a hospital stay with a TV that only picked up ITV4 learnt to enjoy the coverage for that very reason!

I would equate ITV4’s coverage of cycling alongside the BBC’s coverage of tennis. Free-to-air viewers basically only get to watch Wimbledon each year, when the BBC fills out its schedules with fixtures and gets some very healthy ratings. But beyond that, tennis basically disappears from our screens. Even ITV4 no longer has the rights to the French Open as it once did. Again, Eurosport has those.

If that coverage of Wimbledon ever dropped off the BBC (the finals are listed, but not necessarily the whole tournament), then most tennis would disappear from our screens. Diehard tennis fans in the UK are reliant on the main rights holders of ATP and WTA tennis tournaments which is Sky Sports. Wimbledon acts as a gateway to discover tennis. Yes, if you really fall in love with the sport, then you’re probably going to want to subscribe to a premium sports channel to get your fix.

Whatever the case with the Tour de France, it seems likely that from 2026, free-to-air coverage of the Tour de France will mostly disappear from our screens (It’s unclear whether S4C will continue to show it).

It is also worth highlighting that WBD is going to launch Max at some point soon, and building up the value of its sports offer within that overall mix of programming will be important to grow a decent sized subscription offer in the UK beyond its existing discovery+ platform.

And cycling isn’t the only sport going away.

The Guardian reports that the limited number of international cricket T20 fixtures that the BBC had been showing have not found a home from next season. The BBC had broadcast a pair each of men’s and women’s T20 fixtures but has reportedly chosen not to offer as much as it had for continued coverage, which the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) rejected. Attempts to sell the package to ITV or Channel 4 found no takers, and so all international cricket will remain behind the Sky Sports pay wall.

The BBC will continue to show 15 “Hundred” fixtures – seven men’s games and eight women’s games – out of a total of 32 games. It must be said that in a packed 2024 summer that included the Euros and the Olympics, the BBC’s Hundred fixtures felt lost amidst competing sports. And recall that the Hundred only really exists because the ECB already had a T20 format competition – the Vitality Blast – and didn’t want to upset the applecart of the rights it collected from Sky for that.

The BBC will continue to have highlights and digital rights to England Test Cricket as well as radio rights. But TV coverage of international cricket will be fully behind a paywall once again.

Let’s also think about the Six Nations, for which the existing BBC/ITV deal expires after the 2025 competition. The Six Nations is not considered a listed event, meaning that a Pay-TV operator like Sky or WBD (for TNT or Eurosport) could come in and buy the rights. Only highlights would have to be made available free-to-air.

Back in 2021, the private equity group CVC invested “up to £365m” for a 1/7th share of the parent company that controls the rights to the competition. They didn’t do this out the generosity of their hearts! The Autumn Internationals, also owned by Six Nations Rugby, have often been broadcast behind paywalls in recent years, although some fixtures were broadcast by the BBC in the past. This year, TNT Sports and discovery+ have rights to all 21 games (although Wales’ fixtures will be available in Welsh on S4C).

Could WBD make Six Nations Rugby an offer they can’t refuse? If they did, it would remove live international rugby union from free-to-air screens with the exception of the quadrennial Rugby World Cup which ITV has shown since 1991. But even though the final is protected as a listed event, a pay-TV broadcaster could take the rights to the rest of even that tournament. Again, I would remind everyone that Max is coming in the UK.

Whether rugby union effectively disappearing from free TV screens would be good for the long term future of the sport, I will let the reader decide.

Finally, another sport that has been through this is golf. Today there is basically no coverage of live golf on free-to-air television in the UK. The Open, The Masters and the Ryder Cup get highlights coverage on the BBC, but that’s it. And those highlights are often very late at night.

I honestly have no idea where the next generation of golf players is going to come from. Even a non-fan like me, has a fond memory of watching Nick Faldo winning The Masters late at night on BBC2. Today the exploits of Rory McIlroy et al are mostly irrelevant – and I do have access to the fixtures. (And as I’ve mentioned before, I have zero interest in the Ryder Cup).

Not even the Saudi backed LIV Golf has found its way to airwaves in the UK – in the main, perhaps, because the broadcasters who would be likeliest to pick up the rights don’t want to annoy their existing rights holders by dealing with the “opposition.”

The counter to all of this, of course, is that young people don’t watch television any more anyway. The way to reach people surely is via social media platforms like TikTok or YouTube? Since the success of Drive to Survive giving Formula 1 a fillip, lots of other sports including tennis, cycling and athletics have tried to replicate that model of non-live sports programming with varying degrees of success.

But I’m not sure that clips and retrospective documentaries are enough. Younger people may be watching less TV than before, but I’m pretty sure too that premium sports channel subscribers are similarly getting older. There’s not a straight line from “watching clips on Tik Tok” to “buying a Sky Sports subscription via Now TV”.

Sky reported losses recently, and the underlying model of premium sports channels would seem to be challenged in the new media landscape. But sports rights holders are reliant on those massive deals, and it will be interesting to see which major sports broadcaster fully walks away from doing a new deal with a major UK sports body. Because you feel that will happen.

And yes, the new big players in town are the streamers. We’ve seen Amazon do a lot in the UK, taking on tennis for a bit, as well as some Premier League football and now Champions’ League. In the US they have Thursday night NFL and have just signed an NBA agreement (which I believe is global), although the NBA is facing a contractual legal dispute with WBD over the Amazon rights. Netflix too has signed a deal for a Christmas Day NFL fixture. It also has a major new WWE deal beginning soon, and has done one-off tennis and boxing “events” which are all “sports-adjacent.” YouTube has Sunday Ticket NFL games in the US, and Apple has a major investment in MLS.

But these guys aren’t going to over-pay, and not everyone has every service. These are just different paywalls. Visibility of a sport is still the starting point for gaining new fans.

And before we give up on free-to-air TV, a brief reminder that 24 million people watched the Euro 2024 final this summer, when England lost against Spain. That will undoubtedly be the biggest TV audience of the year by a healthy margin.

There’s life in free-to-air yet.

AI generated image above created in Adobe Photoshop with the prompt: “a photorealistic image of a tv on the floor in an empty room with white noise on the screen”