As the checkered flag fell on the 2023 NASCAR season, the upper brass of the sport finalized a deal with NBCUniversal, Fox Sports, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Amazon Prime Video to broadcast and stream the NASCAR Cup Series from 2025 through the end of 2031.
The deal provided a bump from NASCAR’s previous deal with Fox and NBC from 2015 that landed the sport over $800 million per year to $1.1 billion.
The agreement also landed America’s most-popular motorsport several streaming partners throughout the season. Amazon will stream qualifying and practice every weekend for the first 18 weeks (save for exhibitions and the Daytona 500) while MAX takes the remaining events.
All of this seemed well and good until yesterday when Fox Sports and Warner Bros. Discovery announced a joint venture with Disney to create a currently-unnamed streaming service that looks to compete against the likes of Hulu + Live TV and YouTube TV.
Essentially, the broadcast channels that these three providers own will be bundled together, so that includes: ABC, Fox, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN+, TNT, TBS, truTV, Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports 2, ESPNU, ESPNEWS, the SEC Network, the ACC Network, the B1G Network, and the Longhorn Network.
Though this bundle is being pushed as a sports-centric product, subscribers still get access to all non-sports content from each channel.
So, if you enjoy Monday Night Football and General Hospital, you’ll still be able to watch both. If you like watching the Simpsons but still want to catch the occasional Fast & Furious movie on TNT afterwards, you’ll still be able to do that with this package.
But, how does NASCAR factor into all of this?
The short answer is: I don’t know.
The long answer is more complicated.
Not knowing what the 2025 NASCAR schedule looks like makes projecting anything about the sport’s relationship with the new service difficult because nobody, including the upper brass of the sport, knows what that looks like just yet.
For starters, deals like these do not just spawn out of nowhere like Denny Hamlin’s deal with Michael Jordan to form 23XI Racing in 2020. This has most certainly been in the works for several months, possibly even years.
At the present moment, I would imagine NASCAR was aware of this platform’s development during negotiations, so they signed the agreement with this service’s creation in mind.
That means this service would carry the entire second half of the qualifying and practice sessions as they are due to simulcast on truTV. Customers will still need to subscribe to Amazon Prime Video to access the qualifying and practice sessions for the first 19 races.
As for seeing side-by-side action on Saturday nights and Sundays, customers of this new service will be able to watch all of Fox’s slate of races from the Clash to the All-Star Race (or the Coca-Cola 600) before the sport transitions to Amazon for its five-race slate.
TNT takes over from Amazon at the midway point of the year for a five-race slate of their own before handing off to NBC for the final 14 events of the season.
To break it all down, this unnamed service will offer:
- 19 Cup races including the Clash, the Daytona 500, and likely the All-Star Race
- 17 Cup qualifying and practice sessions
- The entirety of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series schedule
- All episodes of NASCAR Race Hub
Two notable omissions from this bundle at current are NBCUniversal and its networks (NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, Peacock) and exclusive Xfinity Series broadcaster, The CW.
The greatest aspect of The CW is its flexibility as viewers don’t need to have any sort of payment to access the channel, especially online where fans will be able to watch the Xfinity Series anywhere they want for free using The CW app.
NBC is another issue altogether.
The broadcast giant launched its streaming service, Peacock, in July 2020, and through a number of gambits such as putting a majority of their legacy programming behind a paywall (looking at you, The Office and Parks and Recreation) and exclusively hosting an NFL Wild Card game this season, the service sits a shade above 31 million subscribers.
From the most recent Census in 2020, nearly 260 million Americans are adults, so that means Peacock’s market share of adults is slightly over 12% while its partner NASCAR services MAX and Amazon have 36.8% and 60.8% respectively.
Fox is NASCAR’s only media partner without a designated streaming service. While the Fox Sports app exists, you would know if you’ve ever used it that its quality is suspect at best, and compared to Peacock, MAX, and Prime Video, it is elementary to say the least.
If anything, this new service from Disney, Warner, and Fox will help Peacock garner more subscriptions due to its omission, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
At the end of the day, all of these massive corporations want a great return on investment. If NASCAR does well on every platform, that’s great for the corporations as well, even if their competitors are getting a slice or two of the pie.
It’s also rather unlikely that NBC joins this deal in any way as it might interfere with their Xfinity brand and its cable service, so this streamer won’t be for everyone, at least right away.
If you’re a NASCAR fan that’s looking to start distancing yourself from cable, this package might be a great place to start.
You get to watch the first half of the season, some of the summer, and most nationally-televised football, basketball, hockey, and baseball games when you’re not watching NASCAR.
The cost of the service is supposed to be between $30-50/month, a drastic departure from the $75+ customers currently pay for streaming cable services like Hulu + Live TV and YouTube TV.
It also offers a fair bit less, not allowing customers to stream anything on Viacom/CBS’ slate of programming as well as NBCUniversal’s channels.
For NASCAR, this new platform does present an opportunity to put themselves in front of younger eyes as cable continues to wither away, but it’s not the full-service offering that would allow fans to watch all 36 races like in the good old days.
For NASCAR fans, it’s a solid alternative to cable where you’ll get a solid amount of races and qualifying, but because of Amazon and NBC, you’ll still likely need to snag a subscription of Prime Video and Peacock to make sure you see all 36 races.
With the service due to release some time in the fall (probably in time for football season), our minds as NASCAR fans will have to race until February 2025 when the Clash returns to see how all of this is going to shake out.
(Top Photo Credit: Getty Images)
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