According to Next TMT’s Frankel & Bloom, a Looper Insights survey of top media-tech executives shows that Amazon, Google, Netflix and “other big tech companies may be controlling the latest ‘feeding frenzy’ for sports rights, not the league.” The NFL reportedly wants to renegotiate its contracts with its TV partners before the start of the 2026 season, but less than 40% of survey respondents said it is “the league that holds the most power in sports media.” Slightly more respondents, about 41%, suggested that “‘global entertainment streamers’ like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video actually control more ‘structural power’ in sports media.” Only 17% said “legacy sports broadcasters adopting streaming” such as Paramount/CBS, NBCU, Disney/ESPN/ABC and Fox wield power. When asked which distribution factors would matter most in the next round of media sports-rights negotiations, approximately 39% of respondents cited “global reach and scale – the largest share for this particular question.” When it comes to the possibility of legacy sports broadcasters re-establishing themselves as global sports streaming powers, respondents are “doubtful”, with only 22% indicating this is a “likely future” and more than 37% predicting they will hand over to a “gradual loss of power to the major streaming companies.” More than 40% of the survey respondents also predicted that what is now the biggest media company of them all, YouTube, would emerge as ‘the complete operating system for sports media,” with nearly 20% suggesting that it would become the ‘primary search layer’ for televised sports” (Next TMT, 3/12).