Tomorrow, Sunday March 3, there will be live tennis on Netflix. The headliners of what is officially called the Netflix Slam are former champion Rafael Nadal and world number 2 Carlos Alcaraz. But who can guess Netflix’s intentions once this event is over…
THE Netflix Slam will be broadcast live wherever Netflix can be watched and games will be commentated in English and Spanish only. The exchanges will take place in the Michelob Ultra arena at Mandalay Bay, a hotel-casino located at the end of Las Vegas Boulevard in the city of the same name.
Other duels than the one between Nadal and Alcaraz, which is scheduled for 3:30 p.m., should precede this program. Montreal player Eugenie Bouchard should normally play a doubles match earlier in the day.
On Netflix, the commentators also have names that will make tennis fans dream: Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick, Jim Courier and Mary Joe Fernandez will analyze each of the exchanges during the game.
Tickets to attend this purely friendly confrontation in person — no scholarships have been announced — cost $88 US, or $120 Canadian dollars. On Netflix, it costs nothing more than the cost of the normal subscription to its online streaming service for films and TV series… and now, non-competition sporting events.
THE Netflix Slam is Netflix’s second attempt in six months to broadcast a live sporting event. Last November, the platform presented the Netflix Cupa golf tournament that pitted professional golfers against Formula 1 drivers that we saw in the series Full Swing And Formula 1: Drive to Survivethemselves already very popular and also featured on Netflix.
It is probably not a coincidence, but this golf tournament, to say the least unusual, also took place in Las Vegas, on the greens of the Wynn golf club, located just behind the hotel of the same name, less than 5 kilometers from Mandalay Bay.
Stage manager
It’s also no coincidence that Netflix isn’t diving fully and squarely into live sports streaming in the same way that rivals Amazon, Apple and Warner Bros. have done. with baseball, football and soccer, for example. The online streaming giant seems more interested in sporting or special events than in an overly strict broadcast schedule consisting of several dozen broadcasts each week.
This explains his preference for short documentary series associated with professional sport, such as NBA basketball, NFL football or even Tour de France cycling.
This is also what Netflix has in store for us in 2025, when the wrestling gala series Raw of WWE will land on its platform. As part of its agreement with WWE, Netflix also has the rights to broadcast special events organized by WWE, such as the WrestleMania, Royal Rumble and SummerSlam galas.
Netflix will also release two new seasons of its Formula 1 series, and rumors continue to swirl that it plans to acquire the rights to live stream F1 races. Again, these are unique weekly events, as opposed to a typical week of activities in a professional sports league like soccer or baseball.
“We sincerely believe that we can offer something very interesting to sports fans on Netflix without having to engage in the very complex economic situation of broadcasting rights”, affirmed at the end of last summer the co-president of Netflix Ted Sarandos.
Mr. Sarandos also uses an expression created from scratch to define Netflix’s positioning in terms of live sports broadcasting. He talks about “sports-adjacent programming” (sport-adjacent programming).
More advertising
This approach, which could be described as a platform manager for live broadcasting, prevents Netflix from spending billions on sports for which we do not yet know to what extent it could attract new subscribers. Or Netflix could create a new, more expensive package, at a time when we’re starting to see consumer fatigue with more online services than their wallets can afford.
But Netflix is not going in this direction, on the contrary. Analysts recently noted that Netflix’s strategy could be advertising.
First, by creating unique sporting events, it gets people talking about Netflix other than on Netflix (hello!). Then, live sporting events such as tennis and professional wrestling make it possible to display advertising on the Netflix platform itself, without it being too annoying to online viewers.
And that is another objective of Netflix: “Our objective is to make advertising revenue a source of income which will be substantial from 2025 and which will increase thereafter”, declared the management of Netflix at the at the end of January.
And that’s why you’ll see Rafael Nadal and Eugenie Bouchard on the Strip in Las Vegas.