Are a large number of people actually interested in sports, or is it a large number of people within your filtered and biased social group that are interested? If I look at what my friends watch I'd get the impression no one watches sports or soaps and everyone would like the TV schedules to be filled with documentaries and satire. That doesn't make it true - it's just that's the sort of people I socialise with.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just questioning whether you've done enough actual research to know if this is really the case.

Is football (the real football, not handegg) popular in Europe and Africa? Is that your question? Football is most certainly popular.

I'm not really debating the popularity of football. Here in the UK it's popular - I'd guess that about 30% to 50% of adults watch it regularly (in a pub or going to a game), with maybe 1/4 of those being interested enough to pay for a TV service to watch it at home. It definitely isn't even close to "all middle to upper class families" as thegenius2000 suggested might be the case in Kenya though.

An interesting related statistic: Almost twice as many people go to the theatre in London as go to all the major Premiership football games[1]. I doubt many people would guess that if they were asked.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/11001177/Almost-t...

There's no doubt that sport (particularly football and cricket) are a sure way to quickly gain market share in certain countries. The problem is, this fact is very well understood in the industry, and therefore the content rights are priced accordingly. I'm in the UK, where it costs a lot of money to acquire Premier League rights, and I doubt it's exactly cheap anywhere in the world.

The question for Netflix — and any content distributor — is whether the benefits justify the price. This calculation will be different for every organisation, based on their financial resources, expansion plans, existing market share, customer base, target customer base, etc. I suspect that, at the moment, the potential benefits from expanding into sport aren't justified for Netflix. They have a strong brand based on access to high-quality, episodic "TV-style" content, that is driving good growth already. Moving into showing live sports would be an expensive risk.

I suspect we'll see Netflix expand into streaming live events eventually, but probably not mainstream sports and news to begin with. It makes more sense for them to identify emerging sectors, such as esports, which have the potential for strong growth, but for which the rights are still relatively cheap.

Counterpoint: nobody really cares that much about footy around here. Furthermore sports are quite useless as on-demand content. Netflix isn't synonymous with live TV.

Why waste a lot of money on very expensive content that does not scale and does not fit the Netflix profile?

No sports is huge in Africa, Specially the Premier League. Most people only have a subscription to Multichoice because of the sport package that's included with the subscription. Having said that, it is possible to stream the Premier league - if you already have a Multichoice subscription.- South African.

Football (Soccer) is so much bigger globally than American football, it's not even close. The Super Bowl attracts 100 million viewers, a Real Madrid vs Barca game attracts 400 million viewers (a regular season game, not even champions league).