Five dollars here, three dollars there, but an increase almost everywhere. Sports streaming services have raised prices and introduced more ads in a bid to make back some of the billions of dollars outlayed for rights in recent years, highlighted by Nine and Stan’s huge Premier League deal secured last week.
The partnership now runs until 2034, and follows the Nine Entertainment group taking over the rights from now defunct Optus Sport last year. The price – reportedly around $120m per year – consolidates the Premier League’s place as the fourth most sought after sporting competition on Australian television.
These ballooning rights fees are increasingly passed on to customers as the sector seeks long-term viability. A survey of costs of Australia’s eight major sports streamers showed six have increased their base pricing since the start of 2025.
Only Disney+ – which offers ESPN – has decreased its base price over that time, but that reflects the introduction of an ad-supported tier, following a trend of subscription platforms that once heralded the lack of advertising now ramping it up.
The president and streaming lead for Paramount Australia and New Zealand, Beverley McGarvey, told the SportNXT conference in Melbourne last week that providers are in a constant push-and-pull with subscribers.
“The price hikes go along with the cost of production and the cost of rights,” she said.
“The audience dictates what you can do, how much they’re willing to pay, how much content they will actually consume, and then the market kind of rights itself, or something new comes along, and for a minute we all run over here [to a different offering].”
The managing director of Channel Nine and Stan, Amanda Laing, said price and content offerings will continue to change.
“You remember most of the streaming services started [with] no ads, ‘you’re paying, so no ads,’ and some services were, ‘over my dead body will there be ads,’” she said.
“And guess what? They’ve all got ads on one tier.”
Netflix introduced an ad-supporter tier in 2022, and has dipped its toe into sports broadcasting. The streamer broadcast last Friday’s NFL match at the MCG to Australian audiences, in rare triple coverage alongside ESPN – also available through Kayo – as well as free-to-air broadcaster Seven.
ESPN has been a staple of Foxtel and Kayo’s Australian offerings, and it has traditionally included advertising. In 2025, the Disney-owned sport network was added to the Australian Disney+ service, which introduced an ad-supported tier in April priced at $10 per month.
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The extension of Stan’s Premier League deal, as well as the NRL’s $5.3bn arrangement with Nine and Foxtel signed earlier this year, means the rights for Australian TV’s four most valuable sporting leagues are under contract until at least 2031, limiting the prospect of disruption by new entrants.
Laing and McGarvey believe there is unlikely to be further fragmentation in Australia over the next decade.
“The number that there is now is probably about the number there’s going to be,” McGarvey said.
That does not mean there will be stability in prices or offers, however. Laing said Stan is always looking at different “levers” to either attract customers or encourage them to spend more.
“Sometimes you need a bit of a push on subs, and you might take a bit of a hit on ARPU [average revenue per user] for a moment because you’re trying to make a big splash,” she said.
The acquisition of Optus Sport and its Premier League rights helped Stan Sport grow subscriptions by 50% last year.
A decline in subscriptions of 70,000 since its peak of 800,000, reported by The Australian on Monday, was largely caused by some former Optus customers opting against paying more for Stan.
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