On June 10, 2026, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust convened a hearing on the Sports Broadcasting Act. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald ran it. The questions were sharp. The witnesses were serious. And the NFL sent nobody.
That sequence tells you most of what you need to know about where sports media regulation stands in 2026.
What the Sports Broadcasting Act Hearing Actually Covered
The 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act granted professional leagues an antitrust exemption to negotiate broadcast deals collectively — meaning all 32 NFL teams could act as a single seller rather than competing with each other for rights fees. The exemption made sense when there were three broadcast networks and the goal was preventing a single network from locking up all football. The subcommittee’s core question in June was whether that exemption still makes sense when the “broadcast” in question is a streaming deal with Amazon.
That is, genuinely, the right question. The law was written for a world with broadcast scarcity. We now have the opposite problem: NFL games are distributed across ten different streaming and broadcast services, and the antitrust exemption designed to protect consumers from monopolistic blackouts is now being used to coordinate the most expensive sports media package in American history.
As sports law analyst Michael McCann noted on X, Congress has tried and failed to modernize or repeal the SBA many times since 1961 — and this hearing looks unlikely to break that streak.
No legislation came out of the hearing. None is expected soon.
How Did We Get to $1,650 for One Sport?
Industry estimates put the cost of watching every NFL game in 2026 at roughly $1,650 per year, spread across the league’s 10 streaming and broadcast partners. The FCC has pegged the number at over $1,500. Either way, the point stands: subscriptions to Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, Netflix, ESPN+, and the rest of the services holding exclusive NFL windows have turned a sport that used to be free to watch into a multi-platform subscription burden.
Forty-six percent of fans have missed a game because they couldn’t figure out where it was streaming. That’s nearly half the audience, locked out of a product they’re already paying for, because the distribution system has become genuinely labyrinthine.
ESPN’s affiliate fee tells the longer story. In 2010, ESPN charged cable providers roughly $4 per subscriber per month. By 2026, that number is approximately $15 — a 275% increase over 15 years. Sports rights inflation drove most of it, and ESPN passed the cost to distributors, who passed it to consumers. ESPN now owns NFL Network, which means the most expensive sports channel in American history now controls the league’s own media property. The subcommittee examined whether the antitrust exemption enabled this consolidation. The answer is clearly yes.
The same dynamic is playing out globally — what sports rights consolidation looks like on the global stage is visible at the FIFA level: the organization is currently seeking $1.5 to $2 billion for the combined English and Spanish rights package for the 2030 and 2034 World Cups. Netflix, Disney, and YouTube are the primary bidders. Fox paid $485 million for 2026 World Cup English rights alone; Telemundo paid $600 million for Spanish rights. The combined $1.085 billion that seemed staggering for a single tournament is now being treated as a baseline.
Goodell Didn’t Show Up. That Tells You Everything.
The NFL declined to testify, citing ongoing litigation. Roger Goodell did not appear.
The league that benefits most directly from the 1961 antitrust exemption — the one that has used collective bargaining rights to orchestrate a $110B media empire across a decade of rights deals — decided congressional scrutiny of that exemption wasn’t worth engaging. There’s no mechanism to compel them. They said no thanks, and that was that.
This is the NFL’s default posture toward oversight it finds inconvenient. It works because Congress has spent 60 years not updating a law designed for the Eisenhower-era television landscape, leaving the league with no real reason to take reform seriously. Goodell skipping this hearing wasn’t defiance. It was a reasonable reading of the situation.
Streaming Is More Entrenched Than Cable Ever Was
The cable era was bad for consumers, but it had one built-in weakness: you could cancel. A single monthly bill, one point of failure, one cancellation call. Streaming fragmentation has engineered something harder to escape. The average sports-watching household now spends $1,475 per year across streaming subscriptions. Unlike cable, those subscriptions carry content beyond sports, which means canceling involves tradeoffs that have nothing to do with the game schedule.
The Sports Broadcasting Act hearing was diagnosing a real problem. The antitrust exemption probably does need revisiting. The questions about streaming concentration and consumer access were pointed and informed — better, honestly, than most congressional hearings on media topics manage to be.
But the window to shape the streaming era from the outside closed around 2018, when Amazon locked up Thursday Night Football and the unbundling of sports from linear TV became irreversible. What Congress is now examining is a market structure that has already set. Whatever legislation eventually emerges — if any does — will be written for a distribution landscape that the next round of rights deals will have already made obsolete.
The hearing was worth having. It just needed to happen in 2011.
