Edward G Robinson’s gangster Johnny Rocco in Key Largo (John Huston, 1948) seems uncertain when asked by Humphrey Bogart and Lionel Barrymore’s sequestered characters what he wants. But after some prompting, he comes up with ‘That’s it. I want more.’ Mindless acquisitiveness matches his mendacity and violence.
And that’s the story with the discreditable alliance between pro sports and the screen. Let’s consider some numbers and history, culminating in the environmental implications of the current conjuncture’s destructive shift from broadcast and cable TV coverage to streaming.
The last twenty-five years have seen significant struggles between different factions of capital to obtain consumer subscriptions for broadband, cable, satellite, telephony, and wifi. Sports became part of this conflict as coverage slipped away from broadcast, free-to-air television. Rupert Murdoch notoriously, indecorously said his companies ‘use sports as a ‘battering ram” to obtain subscribers (quoted in Milliken, 1996). In the late 1990s, France’s Canal+ estimated that 40% of its audience signed on just to watch football (Williams 1998: M3; Williams 1999: 104). By 1999, this enticement saw the rights to cover European matches on TV cost over two billion dollars (Croci and Ammirante 1999: 500).
Today, the terrain has shifted. Newer online formations seek to attract young viewers with few affiliations to broadcasting or cable. In the embarrassingly mindless metaphors deployed by the industry, a ‘full funnel approach’ claims the ‘ability to drive right through to commerce’ (quoted in Weprin, 2024). Amazon is taking advantage of commercial TV’s loss of advertising revenue to buy sports rights at depressed prices. It plans to draw subscribers to Prime both to watch and buy goods, while distracting attention from its labor practices and ecological record and gaining general goodwill (Hutchins et al., 2019; Poindexter, 2021). Streamers have become partners with cable sports networks to dominate how programs are watched online (Szalai, 2024). From the other direction, Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, and Fox have plans to stream sports together (Steinberg, 2024). In place of Murdoch’s ‘battering ram,’ the new grotesque cliché is that sports provide the media with a ‘core competitive differentiation’ (Vernon et al., 2024).
Enabled by the Summer Olympics and football’s European Championships (the Euros), 2024 saw over sixty billion dollars expended on rights, up 12% on the previous year (SportBusiness, 2024). In the US, 16.5% went to streamers (Genovese, 2024), which spent ten billion worldwide on sports (Ampere 2025: 6). Apple TV purchased global coverage of Major League Soccer for a decade from 2023 at $250 million per year, matching its deals for Major League Baseball. Amazon Prime captured certain Yankees home games, NFL fixtures (for ten billion), and Europe’s Champions League, and announced emerging interests in motorsport and women’s basketball. Google bought Sunday NFL rights for fourteen billion from 2024. Netflix started League coverage that year, “wrestling” in 2025, and the women’s World Cup of football from 2027, investing five billion over a decade (Silverman and Ourand, 2022; Battaglio, 2022; Kafka, 2021; Weprin, 2021 and 2024; Germano et al., 2022; Porter, 2024). DAZN handed FIFA a billion euros to broadcast the inaugural Club World Cup in 2025 (“DAZN,” 2024). Formula One’s income from media rights grew 7.9% in 2024 to $1.18 billion as it sought to switch from US cable to streaming (Agini, 2025).
The implications for our environment are dire. For instance, 2021’s Super Bowl TV commercials produced two million tonnes of CO2 from 6.3 billion spectators—26 million online—and 64 billion references on “social” media. A million such impressions, as they are known, equate to a metric tonne of CO2 (L, 2024). Each minute a person uses TikTok, 2.63 grams of carbon are emitted (Musto, 2024). An hour of streaming to mobile gadgets requires more electricity than two new refrigerators (Mills, 2013). Even on standby, they exhaust hundreds of terawatt hours a year, equal to massive numbers of coal-fired power plants (International Energy Agency, 2014). People watching sports on these wee devices increase their footprint tenfold in comparison with television (Carbon Trust, 2013, n.d., and 2016; TePoel, 2017).
By 2023, the world’s data centers consumed as much electricity as Britain (“Can Computing,” 2023) and were responsible for 4.4% of overall US energy use (Shehabi et al., 2024). There are over ten thousand of these “clouds” across the globe, about half in the Americas, a third in Asia. They require around 55 gigawatts of energy and 300m square feet of land (“The Data-Centre,” 2025). They also need a lot of water—official disclosures indicate that the Google cloud used 21.198 million liters in 2022, an increase of 20% on 2021, and Microsoft’s 6.435 million, up 34% (Google, 2023; Microsoft, 2022). Apple, Meta, Google, and Microsoft understated their 2023 greenhouse-gas emissions by 662% (O’Brien, 2024). Google, Microsoft, and Apple are building dozens of data centers in parched areas of the world, denying local people much-needed reserves (Source Material, 2025).
TV studies needs to contribute to public/policy debates on sports rights, both in terms of the commodification of audiences and the fetish for growth per Johnny Rocco that is so destructive of our environment.
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