A report on the state of sports information on streaming services outside of life games was released by Luminate in December. The” 2024 Sports Shoulder Content Report” provides a firsthand look at how sports movies have performed over the past five years as well as covering popular Netflix series like Formula 1: Drive to Survive and Quarterback.
Many of these displays have come from sports-centric production companies, including several courted by players. Some initiatives have received criticism for failing to maintain convincing narratives over the course of a season. Luminate’s statistics revealed that the days watched of specific plans like Receiver, the follow-up to Quarterback, and time two of Full Swing had sharp falls.

Ross Raphael, a former talent agent for CAA, noted that the report did not have any data until the year’s end, when more head information was made available during the fall and winter. With more displays being produced, he said excellent good suffered.
According to Raphael,” there was such a massive increase in the level… with more networks buying sports and the existing buyers buying more of it,” according to a phone discussion. This in turn makes it more difficult to preserve a higher standard of premium programming. Nevertheless, I believe quality does and does often continue to reduce through”.
For players like Netflix, Prime Video, Max, and people, the head material complements the lived athletics rights they have acquired over the past few years. When players and sites were searching for their own versions of ESPN’s 2020 docuseries The Next Dance, the size of these programs soared during the top of the coronavirus pandemic. The series on Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls in 1997-98 averaged 6.7 million viewers per episode and became the network’s most-watched documentary series.
Raphael cited Meadowlark Media’s release of The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox as proof that the sports documentary subgenre still exists. Raphael remarked,” It was a huge hit, spending nearly two weeks in the top 10 and having the highest retention rate for a sports series on the platform in a long time.”
Some production companies have continued to feed that beast, most notably Box-to-Box, the studio behind Drive to Survive, and Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions.
Others have diversified from documentaries. Unanimous Media, the production company for Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry, is one such athlete-led studio. The Queen of Basketball, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short Film in 2023, was produced alongside ShaquilleO’Neal. Holey Moley, an ABC television series, and the animated version of Good Times for Netflix are among its most well-known works.

Unanimous hasn’t put all its eggs in the TV or film production baskets. In 2020, Curry and Erick Payton, the company’s CEO, were producing Underrated, the documentary about Curry’s emergence from Davidson College to his incomparable NBA career. Curry and Payton were considering launching a comics, book, podcast, and gaming business as the demand for sports shoulder content increased.
” All of them are built to inspire. All of them are built to have really big upsides”, Payton said in a video interview. ” From a very high-level perspective, we looked at it as we have a little time. There’s not a vertical that we can’t operate around, so let’s create a business. And that’s why we’ve continued to be profitable every single year we’ve been open”.
Unanimous Media’s financial information was not made public, but Payton said Unanimous Media’s revenue is projected to increase once more in 2024. The company has produced series for the media giant’s Peacock streaming service and has a production deal with NBC Universal. The eight-episode comedy series Mr. Basketball, which starred Curry and Adam Pally, debuted on Peacock during the Summer Olympics and aired on NBC later in the fall, and its most recent offering is Mr. Basketball.
Raphael, the criticism of the streamers ‘ recent sports shoulder content, especially from the athletes themselves, doesn’t stop the demand for it.
” I think it goes back to the period when society and culture are extremely interested in what is happening in these athletes ‘ lives,” Raphael said. ” Especially with the dislocation in sports media, you see a lot of these athletes owning their own content, owning their own narrative, and their names open doors. It brings built-in marketing, but it also brings access at a time when access could never be more important”.