This is the second part of a three-part series, Public Value in Play: How Public Broadcasters Can Lead the Next Era of Sports Coverage. Read part one here.
The final of the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) 2025 yielded great ratings for the tournament’s broadcast partners. M6, a private French channel, said the final was watched by 3.4 million viewers. beIN SPORTS reported audience figures peaked at 756,000 across the Middle East and North Africa. In Italy, an average of 903,132 viewers watched the match on digital channel Sportitalia. And in the UK, 2.4 million tuned into public broadcaster Channel 4’s coverage.
Channel 4’s coverage of the AFCON final was the culmination of a historic deal with The Confédération Africaine de Football (CAF). For the first time, the tournament was available to watch for free in the UK. And the public, including younger generations, was thrilled; the final delivered a 19% share of the 16-34 audience, up 614% on the overnight slot average for the coveted demographic.
The numbers reinforce public broadcasters’ position in the sports ecosystem. “We still make up a really important part of the sports broadcasting lens,” said Pete Andrews, head of sport at Channel 4. “I know everything is fragmenting, but the power of the public service is still there, which is really important.”
Regulation as a Competitive Advantage
The power of public service broadcasting in sports stems, first and foremost, from regulatory frameworks. Numerous jurisdictions maintain statutory frameworks designed to reconcile the monetization of broadcast rights with the principle of universal access for major sporting events, such as the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, etc.
In the UK, for example, the Media Act 2024 ensures that sporting events “of national interest” are widely available to audiences for free. The Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), an EU regulation, allows member states to determine that events “of major importance for society” will be broadcast on free-to-air channels, even if exclusive rights have been purchased by pay-TV operators.
A good illustration of how this works comes from Germany. Deutsche Telekom recently secured the rights for the 2026 FIFA World Cup and will air all 104 matches on its streaming service, MagentaTV. However, 60 of those matches will also be shown on ZDF and ARD, the two main public broadcasters, including all the German national team games, the tournament’s opening match, the two semi-finals, and the final.
Big Moments, Bigger Expectations
Tentpoles like the FIFA World Cup present opportunities and challenges. Marquee sports events, said Tim Banks, CRO at Grass Valley, a technology provider for the live media industry, remain “one of the last truly shared cultural experiences, yet the role of live sports production becomes more demanding. The distributed production environment must be agile enough to support a whole ecosystem of alternate cuts and short-form expressions at breakneck speed.”
In some countries, this new packaging of moments is already built into the regulations. In Germany, for example, a reform treaty that came into effect last December restricts public broadcasters from publishing text-based content on their owned platforms (websites, apps, and on-demand players), shifting the focus to video-based content to modernize, streamline, and digitize public service media.
The reform, said ZDF’s director-general Norbert Himmler, “will enable us to further expand our offerings and to continue to advance the streaming network together with ARD. At the same time, the requirements for the use of text in online offerings pose major challenges for us. This limits our news offerings and increases bureaucratic effort.”
Turning Constraints into Momentum
One field where the new requirements won’t limit ZDF’s offering, or increase its bureaucratic effort, is sports. Thanks to a partnership with WSC Sports, the German broadcaster can leverage AI to automate the creation and distribution of sports content across all channels, including owned platforms, enabling it to fully comply with regulations without increasing headcount.
But it goes beyond compliance. Rights to major sporting events give public media a rare advantage in today’s landscape: guaranteed reach, mass discoverability, and cultural relevance. Simply airing the live feed, though, is not enough to capitalize on that attention. AI-powered content creation tech allows broadcasters to provide a constant stream of highlights, narratives, and moments from sports spectacles, turning universal access into sustained engagement and, most importantly, bolstering their offerings to the general public.
The third and final article in this series will detail, through concrete use cases, how forward-thinking broadcasters are embracing innovation and AI-powered technologies to overcome structural media challenges and seize the opportunities that sports rights create.
