In the United States, sports are televised on various broadcast networks, national and specialty sports cable channels, and regional sports networks. U.S. sports rights are estimated to be worth a total of $22.42 billion in 2019, about 44 percent of the total worldwide sports media market.^[1] U.S. networks are willing to pay a significant amount of money for television sports contracts because it attracts large amounts of viewership; live sport broadcasts accounted for 44 of the 50 list of most watched television broadcasts in the United States in 2016.^[2]

Among these television contracts, NBC holds a $7.75 billion contract, signed in 2014, to air the Olympic Games through the 2032 games,^[3] making it a major source of revenue for the International Olympic Committee.^[4] The broadcast deals of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), running through 2032 (and including its most significant property, the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament — colloquially known as "March Madness"), were worth $8.8 billion in 2018.^[5]

The U.S. is home to four of the top five professional sports leagues by revenue in the world: Major League Baseball (MLB), National Basketball Association (NBA), National Football League (NFL), and National Hockey League (NHL). The NFL has the largest television contracts, and earns over $6 billion annually from its contracts with Fox, CBS, NBC, ESPN and DirecTV for the 2014 through 2022 seasons.^[6] MLB earns $1.5 billion annually from its contracts signed in 2012 with ESPN, Fox, and Turner Sports (TBS) for the 2014 through 2021 seasons.^[7] In 2014, the NBA signed a nine-year television deal with ABC/ESPN and TNT that generates annual league television revenues of $2.66 billion beginning with the 2016–17 season,^[8] while the NHL earns $625 million annually from seven-year contracts signed in 2021 with ESPN and Turner Sports to last until the 2027–28 season.^[9][10]

American football

National Football League

Since the 1960s, all regular season and playoff games broadcast in the United States have been aired by national television networks. Until the broadcast contract ended in 2013, the terrestrial television networks CBS, NBC, and Fox, as well as cable television's ESPN, paid a combined total of US$20.4 billion^[11] to broadcast NFL games. From 2014 to 2022, the same networks paid $39.6 billion for exactly the same broadcast rights.^[12] The NFL thus holds broadcast contracts with four companies (Paramount Global, Comcast, Fox Corporation, and ESPN Inc.—which is majority owned by The Walt Disney Company, respectively) that control a combined media cross-ownership in the United States. League-owned NFL Network, on cable television, also broadcasts a selected number of games nationally. In 2017, the NFL games attracted the top three rates for a 30-second advertisement: $699,602 for NBC Sunday Night Football, $550,709 for Thursday Night Football (NBC), and $549,791 for Thursday Night Football (CBS).^[13]

For the 2020 NFL season, two extra wild card playoff games are being added to the schedule; CBS and NBC acquired rights to these new games, with both paying roughly $70 million each.^[14]

Television