Streaming Platforms Race to Expand Content: Sports Rights and the Visibility Question

Paramount+ has just confirmed an order for a new animated series, "Avatar Kuruk: Wave of Chaos", an expansion of the Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise. The work is produced by Avatar Studios in partnership with Nickelodeon Animation Studios, under the hands of two creators, Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, and has been renewed for two seasons; the release date has not yet been announced. For most audiences, this is purely entertainment news. But after nearly three decades in the sports commentary booth, I have learned that announcements like this rarely speak only about themselves. A platform deciding to expand an animation universe is also telling us how it prices every kind of content — sports included.

The content race has changed its rules

The race among streaming platforms has entered a different phase. If the early stage was a battle for the rights to films, series and documentaries, platforms have now shifted toward producing their own content and expanding brand universes. An animation brand like Avatar can spawn films, spin-offs, games and merchandise — that is, recurring revenue, which every platform craves. Producing a high-quality animated season can cost tens of millions of dollars, but in return it becomes a permanent asset, independent of any third party.

Within that picture, sports is a special piece. Sports is the only content type that still preserves true "liveness": audiences must watch immediately, cannot rewind, cannot wait. That is why sports rights have become the most expensive asset in the media market. Streaming platforms, having built up their libraries of films and series, all turn to sports as the final step to retain subscribers.

Sports: the last live piece

In Vietnam, this story is far from unfamiliar. In recent years, domestic and international streaming platforms have constantly competed to secure broadcast rights to major football competitions, from the Premier League and the Champions League to regional tournaments. Rights fees rise with each cycle, and every increase brings a debate: whether fans must pay more to watch the same match. Sports becomes a scarce commodity, and whoever holds it holds the audience.

Media market research has long shown that sports is one of the few content types that holds viewers in real time, and therefore has the strongest power to retain subscriptions. A major match can generate a simultaneous audience no film can match. That power turns sports into a strategic card, but also into a card easily speculated upon. Yet precisely because it is a commodity, sports is beginning to be viewed through a financial lens more than a sporting one.

When sports becomes a content asset

When sports enters the logic of a "content asset", the way it is valued changes too. A league is no longer seen by its sporting value, but by its global scalability, its ability to generate advertising and its ability to retain subscribers. This is where the story becomes complicated for women's sports.

In 2026, when I began analyzing WK League data for a digital platform, I tracked Incheon Hyundai Steel Red Angels for six months. A substitute striker named Choi Yu-ri played only 214 minutes but recorded an expected goals (xG) figure of 3.2 — the highest in the squad. I wrote about her potential; a month later, she was given a start in the final match of the season and scored twice, helping the team win the title. The lesson I drew was not in the number, but in this: women's sports does not lack quality, only people willing to look.

From the numbers, I see a person waiting to be named. And in the sports media industry, people tend only to look at the numbers that have already been illuminated.

The visibility gap and the self-feeding loop

In reality, women's sports has long been systematically ignored. In South Korea, where I work, the WK League was for years covered only sporadically; women's matches often lacked long-term television contracts. When a league is not broadcast, it has no audience; when it has no audience, it is considered unattractive; and when it is considered unattractive, it is broadcast even less. That loop feeds itself, rather than reflecting true quality.

In 2026, at the Tokyo Olympics, the South Korean women's team under coach Colin Bell took only one point from three matches. But reviewing the data, I saw their PPDA figure was 8.6 — the lowest in the tournament, meaning an extremely intense pressing system despite a physical disadvantage. That was a meaningful defeat, and my article about it reached 250,000 reads, the highest of my career. That number showed the opposite of the prejudice: audiences are ready to read about women's sports if the writer is serious enough.

In Vietnam, the women's national team's first-ever appearance at the 2026 Women's World Cup was a milestone. But after the tournament, a familiar question returned: is the national women's championship broadcast regularly, or does it only flare up and fade with each major event?

The paradox: more platforms, less visibility?

Here a paradox emerges. People often believe that the more platforms and the more content there is, the more chances women's sports has to appear. That belief sounds reasonable, but it is easily wrong. Because platforms do not expand out of kindness; they expand for profit, and profit is measured by global scalability. An animation brand like Avatar crosses borders easily; a national women's football league is far harder. When everything is a "content asset", assets that are hard to scale get placed last — even if their sporting value is no lower.

What is worrying is not indifference, but indifference dressed in the clothing of data. When a platform says "viewership is low, so we will not buy", it is using a number born from the very lack of visibility to justify continuing not to show it. Numbers do not lie, but they know how to hide.

From rights to people

I also see another risk, familiar from esports. When professionalization turns players into assembly-line products, individual play is smoothed away in digital training. The same could happen to women's sports: players turned into marketing images, while the human story is pushed aside. We need rights, but we must not let rights swallow the people.

Once again, I return to an old principle: get a name wrong, remember it for life; fix it, and you value it more. In the digital content era, calling a women's player by her correct name, telling her story correctly, is no longer only a matter of journalistic ethics — it is also a way to keep an asset from being made invisible before the spreadsheet.

Conclusion

In 2026, amid the pandemic, I was exhausted and lay still for three weeks without writing a single line. A video call with midfielder Ji So-yun — who once played for Chelsea — brought me back. She told me that at fourteen she had to leave her family to train alone. That phone call in the pandemic taught me that sport heals without an audience. But if there is an audience, it heals more people.

At fifty, I understand that the pitch has no borders, but the heart has coordinates. Streaming platforms now hold the power to open doors. They can use it to repeat the old hierarchy, or to open new doors. The corridor of women's sports is not only about victories, but about doors slowly opening. The question for those in the boardroom is not "can women's sports draw an audience" — the data has already answered — but "do we have the courage to look at the numbers that have never been illuminated".