Key Points
- Among 2,000 U.S. adults who visited a sports bar in the past year, 31 percent preferred attending a major sporting event in person, while 29 percent preferred a sports bar and 29 percent preferred watching at home.
- Football is the biggest draw: 90 percent of respondents identified as football fans, while 69 percent said they were likely to watch the NFL playoffs at a sports bar and 66 percent cited NFL regular-season games.
- The survey was conducted by DIRECTV for Business, a provider of live television channels and sports broadcasts to bars, restaurants, hotels and other public venues.
Sports bars are nearly as popular as home viewing for major sporting events, according to new research commissioned by DIRECTV FOR BUSINESS released this month.
The survey, called “What Makes A Great Sports Bar?”, points to the continued appeal of communal viewing as sports programming becomes more fragmented across television and streaming services. It found 31 percent of respondents would prefer to watch a major sporting event in person at a stadium or arena. Sports bars and home viewing were tied at 29 percent each.
Football was the dominant draw, with 90 percent of respondents identifying as football fans. The NFL playoffs were the most popular sports bar event at 69 percent, followed by NFL regular-season games at 66 percent and the Super Bowl at 62 percent.
Access to games also matters. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they visit sports bars to watch games they cannot access at home, while 33 percent cited the ability to watch multiple games at once as a favorite part of the experience.
But the research suggests access alone is not the main attraction. Respondents identified the atmosphere or vibe as their favorite aspect of sports bars at 51 percent, followed by food and drink selection at 50 percent and large-screen televisions at 40 percent.
The social component was also significant: Sixty-six percent said they had made a new friend at a sports bar, while 15 percent reported making a professional networking contact and 14 percent said they had met a romantic partner or spouse.
Sports viewing also influenced schedules. Nearly 80 percent of respondents said they had altered plans in the past 12 months to watch a sporting event. Among those who changed plans, 40 percent had left work early and 23 percent had called in sick or taken a day off.
The survey comes at a time when more sports rights holders are forging agreements with streaming platforms for distribution of their games, despite the fact that traditional linear broadcast networks — like the ones DIRECTV for Business carries on its platform — continue to draw the strongest share of audience, per data from Nielsen.
Sports fans have also expressed frustration in trying to track down where games are in any given week, with rights split across broadcast networks, cable channels and streaming platforms. A survey released by Hub Entertainment Research earlier this year found 90 percent of sports fans were bothered by having to stay on top of where games are available.
DIRECTV has tried to make it somewhat easier for those fans by launching genre-based streaming packs that offer traditional broadcast networks over broadband paired with access to network-owned streaming services like NBC’s Peacock, Disney’s ESPN Unlimited, Fox One and HBO Max.
But bars and restaurants can’t simply sign up for one of those genre-based packages and offer live games to their customers — as businesses, they have to clear the rights to public performances and pay additional fees to effectively resell access to live broadcasts and games in their establishments.
Since at least the mid-1990s, DIRECTV offered a robust solution to deliver live sports over satellite to those businesses, ensuring bars and restaurants are able to offer several games across multiple screens at once. Businesses felt confident that their investments in DIRECTV’s equipment would work for years — and, for the most part, it did.
EverPass Media threatened to throw a wrench into that plan this year when it began notifying bars and restaurants that DIRECTV would no longer have the right to their NFL Sunday Ticket package, which is arguably one of the biggest draws to sports bars and restaurants on Sunday. Instead, those establishments would need to purchase streaming hardware from EverPass Media and maintain their own separate broadband network to ensure they could provide the NFL Sunday Ticket this season, they warned.
Documentation reviewed by The Desk, which has since been pulled from the Internet, offered a clear warning to businesses: Don’t count on DIRECTV or anyone else offering NFL Sunday Ticket this year — if you want it, you need EverPass Media.
Faced with mounting pressure from bar and restaurant owners and the threat of having federal lawmakers scrutinize the matter, EverPass Media relented this summer, announcing an agreement with DIRECTV for Business to provide NFL Sunday Ticket over satellite this season. The announcement came after some restaurant owners already purchased equipment from EverPass, and more than a few have taken to social media to complain about the matter.
That situation could have been avoided if EverPass Media had given bars and restaurants a longer runway to ensure their equipment was ready for the transition while maintaining some kind of presence on DIRECTV for Business, especially for small restaurant and bar owners who depend on live sports to bring in customers but didn’t have immediate capital to invest in upgrading their TV systems.
EverPass Media is now in the process of being acquired by DAZN, and it is possible that the new ownership will lead to a shift in the strategy of how games are distributed.
DIRECTV for Business has at least 300,000 reasons why EverPass Media might want to consider a long-term deal with them — that’s the number of subscribers the service has, including bars, restaurants and other venues that offer NFL Sunday Ticket and other premium live sports. Most already have DIRECTV equipment that works well with their systems, and few want to shell out more money to upgrade simply to maintain access to a football package.
Given recent scrutiny by some football fans as to whether NFL Sunday Ticket is “worth it” for home viewing (the package sold through YouTube is getting more expensive, despite the fact that the NFL continues to siphon games away from traditional TV networks), the likelihood that more fans will seek out commercial establishments on Sunday afternoons is getting higher every season.
