Netflix’s First Swing into Live Sports? A Celebrity Golf Tournament

As Ted Sarandos once said, Netflix isn’t “anti-sports,” they’re “pro-profit” — and it turns out the streamer may have found a live sports event that’s worth taking a swing at.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Netflix is in talks to livestream the rights to a Las Vegas celebrity golf tournament, one that would actually feature stars from two of Netflix’s more popular sports shows, the golf series “Full Swing” and the Formula One series “Drive to Survive.”

The event would be its first foray into the live sports space, something that’s been debated at Netflix for over a year but that they’ve so far stayed out of, even as the dollars spent for other sports rights has exploded. But while it’s unclear at this stage, this could be just a one-off event hosted by Netflix rather than the streamer buying an entire league’s streaming rights.

WSJ said that the talks for Netflix to acquire the rights are in an early stage. Netflix when reached by IndieWire had no comment.

While Netflix could easily be one of the deep-pocketed players for something like the TV rights to the NBA, which is coming on the block very soon, Sarandos said back in December that they haven’t figured out a way to profit when it comes to “renting big sports.” With how expensive some of these rights have become — whether it’s Amazon paying $1 billion per year to the NFL for Thursday Night Football, Apple’s massive deal for MLS, or even how much ESPN had to pony up to retain Formula One rights — spending a bunch to stream a sport you don’t actually control makes even less sense in streaming than it does in linear TV.

“We’ve yet to figure out how to do it,” Sarandos previously said at the UBS Global TMT Conference. “I’m very confident we can get twice as big without sports, and beyond that maybe we’ll have to figure out, and by that point maybe the economics change or we’ll have the scale to figure that out.”

The difference now though is Netflix has ads — and they need live programming if they want to scale up that business quickly (and hit some of those lofty Wall Street expectations). After doing the live Chris Rock special, Netflix hit a snag with its livestream of the “Love Is Blind” reunion show, and a celebrity golf tournament featuring Netflix stars sounds like a low risk way to further test out its live capabilities.