This is chapter 4 of our 6-part series “2026 and Beyond: Sports Industry Leaders on What’s Next”, bringing the voices of industry leaders from WSC Sports Madrid Huddle to wrap up 2025.
The most successful sports media strategy in 2026 will be taking advantage of every channel and platform — whether that’s the live broadcast, your own app, or 3rd party platforms.
"Being at the forefront of innovation is a must in today's sports media landscape, and we feel that in CANAL+ we are doing that as much as possible," said Matthieu Montigaud, the French broadcaster's Lead Sport Product Manager. "With the help of the right technology partners, we offer fully interactive experiences to fans, allowing them to choose from various camera angles, statistics, highlight packages, formations, rankings, and more. We are trying to always push the limits of innovation to get more engagement, more community, more interactivity."
But CANAL+'s real innovation is in their aggregation model. "We are producer, distributor, and also aggregator," Montigaud explains. "Now we have Netflix, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Bein Sports — all in the same bundle. In 2023, it was the first time ever Apple TV+ allowed anyone to play content directly into their app. We were the first in the world to have this kind of integration."
Jared Hoffman of Warrior Media captured the philosophical shift: "Walls are your enemy. Encourage the audience, within reason, to drive your brand. You're not the only one who has to do it anymore.” This was also part of the findings from The2025/26 WSC Sports Fan Engagement Study: How Gen X, Y, and Z Are Redefining Sports Fandom, which was discussed during the Madrid Huddle.
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This omnipresent approach is exactly what saved LFP Media. "You need to penetrate the market, and for this you need the help and the support of the big guys who are already there," says Martin Aurenche. "What we've been successful at is to be on any of the platforms, on any homepage of those platforms who were carrying the service. During the whole summer they pushed the brand very strongly, and the service to their customers."
The result? Cyprien Castanedo described it as "hyperdistribution." League One Plus now appears on Orange, SFR, Free, Prime Video, DAZN, Molotov, and more. Which was a move that made sense, "because a League One Plus customer on the distributor side is also a One Football customer or a Molotov customer, they are pushing the offer and they are becoming a bit like your marketing agency."
For established broadcasters like Sky Deutschland, this means embracing what might have once seemed like competition. Alessandro Reitano, Sky's SVP of Sports Production, puts it directly: "We are the platforms which are aggregating tons of content for every flavor of this population. As long as you have the meaningful content, and whatever you don't have, bring it on your platform so that your customer sticks on your platform."
The old binary choice between owning the customer relationship or licensing to a broadcaster — is dissolving. The new model is both simultaneously, creating a web of access points where fans can encounter your content wherever they already spend time. Forcing fans to come to a single destination is an obsolete strategy. Becoming impossible to avoid across the entire digital landscape is the way to go.
For more content like this, check out the next article in this series, Technology as the Great Equalizer.
