Sports networks most expensive in price to value equation of US basic cable networks

We examined the affiliate revenues earned by basic cable networks over the course of a year, comparing them to the average number of households reached within a 24-hour period during the same year. Our analysis revealed that among these networks, those dedicated to sports tend to have the highest carriage fees relative to the number of households they reach, making them the most expensive on a per-viewer basis.

Multichannel operators pay high carriage fees for sports networks as the live nature of sports programming is largely compatible with the linear TV consumption of avid sports fans. These fans are willing to pay more to access their favorite sports programming. The high prices of channel packages with sports networks help multichannel operators recoup the expensive affiliate fees that they pay to cable network owners. It is important to note that, on average, the 17 sports networks in our database demanded license fees amounting to $10,230 per average viewer, which is nearly three times the industrywide average of $3,590 from all the 106 basic cable networks we tracked in 2022.

Family and kids-oriented basic cable networks followed sports channels in terms of the most expensive average carriage fees per average viewer in 2022. The 14 children's networks we tracked logged an average affiliate revenue per average 24-hour delivery of $3,472 during the year, which is only slightly below the industrywide average of $3,590.

^{Economics of Networks is a regular feature from Kagan, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.}