SBJ Unpacks: Fox showing ads during World Cup hydration breaks

Tonight in Unpacks: Fox Sports is taking a “hybrid” approach to hydration breaks during the World Cup, sources tell SBJ’s Austin Karp, and during the first such pause in Thursday’s Mexico-South Africa game, the network ran full-screen ads.

Also tonight:

• Zuffa Boxing causes stir among the sport’s traditional promotions
• CFTC’s Selig: League input ‘factored in’ proposed prediction rules
• Turning younger audiences into fans
• Op-ed: Sports is the hardest part of streaming

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Joe Lemire discusses if the FIFA World Cup can transcend the noise around the lead-up to the event as it kicks off Thursday in Mexico, the viewership bonanza from Game 3 of Knicks-Spurs in the NBA Finals, the growing rift in college sports around the Brendan Sorsby ruling and more.

Fox Sports will be taking a hybrid approach to what fans see on-screen for hydration breaks during FIFA World Cup game telecasts, sources tell SBJ. When Fox is addressing “editorial” moments during hydration breaks, sources said there will be a picture-in-picture approach. An example would be one camera on Fox play-by-play announcer John Strong or analysts, with another picture showing what players are doing on the field during the break.

However, Fox will also be deploying some full-screen commercials and promos during the hydration breaks. Those full-screen ads could be lucrative for the network, as World Cup matches have never before had hydration breaks to provide commercial opportunities.

The first three-minute hydration break of the tournament came with just over 24 minutes gone in Thursday’s Mexico-South Africa match. Fox’s Ian Darke introduced the break by saying, “This hydration break is powered by Powerade.” The net then cut to a full-screen commercial break featuring ads from AT&T, Michelob Ultra, Lowe’s and FanDuel, as well as an in-house promo for Friday’s U.S.-Paraguay match.

Telemundo opted against any full-screen ads during hydration breaks on its Spanish-language World Cup telecasts, but the network told SBJ there could be some commercial elements incorporated into a picture-in-picture approach.

Dana White gripped the microphone and smirked as he told reporters about his disbelief over what he viewed as a lack of resistance from legacy boxing promoters. The proverbial seas were parting for him and his new property, Zuffa Boxing.

“There hasn’t been any pushback — this is like beating up babies. I feel like I came in and I’m beating up babies,” White said at a press conference in February. “I expected more. I expected some pushback. I expected some of them to be more game. They’re all way out of their league — like absolutely, positively out of their league. I’m actually a little shocked.”

After a decade of flirting with boxing, the outspoken president and CEO of mixed martial arts property Ultimate Fighting Championship has finally gotten into the fray, as he helps make TKO Group Holdings omnipresent in fighting. The right time for White to enter the sport came in part when TKO gained access to the deep pockets of Saudi Arabia.

Through a partnership with Saudi power broker Turki Al-Sheikh and the Saudi entertainment company Sela, Zuffa is trying to disrupt the “sweet science” with big money, potent influence and a new model that looks similar to the one that vaulted UFC to being worth around $12 billion when TKO was formed in 2023.

The league has signed more than 100 fighters, and rumors emerge every week about other big names coming aboard. Among the signees are Jai Opetaia and Conor Benn, with Shakur Stevenson, one of boxing’s biggest stars, also being linked with Zuffa.

Fights are airing on Paramount Skydance Corp. channels, just like UFC, but details of the multiyear media rights deal have not been made public. Zuffa has had seven fight cards, but it has yet to appear on CBS.

Zuffa’s first six events were held in Las Vegas at the UFC’s Meta Apex facility, whose capacity is only slightly more than 1,000, but White is in talks about taking the show on the road. Zuffa was included in a recent TKO announcement about several of its properties hosting events in Arizona, representative of potential future joint efforts. It also announced that its first New York City fight will take place at the Infosys Theater in July.

War of words

White’s words and bravado are the subject of daily debate in the fighting industry. Now, the water-cooler topic is whether Zuffa will save or destroy boxing. What’s harder for anyone to deny is the upheaval wrought by White and TKO.

The Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act — a bill backed by TKO that would change boxing regulation in the U.S. — is making its way through Congress, and it has sparked division within the sport. The law would allow a company, such as TKO, to be both a sanctioning body and a promoter, instead of only being one or the other.

Rival promoters — including Matchroom, in which George Pyne’s Bruin Capital just invested — are working closely together in what some perceive to be a consolidation of their power against Zuffa. White also is engaged in a constant back-and-forth with Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn through interviews that have even included callouts to box.

The sanctioning bodies that have long been a key cog of the sport are having their business models questioned in forums ranging from social media to investment conferences and Senate committee hearings. And every chance they get, White, TKO board member Nick Khan and TKO President Mark Shapiro are pointing out how boxing has fallen behind and needs new entrants.

Add it all up, and Zuffa is already affecting the boxing industry in a way that hasn’t been seen since at least 2015, when Premier Boxing Champions promised to bring a new paradigm to the sport.

“The whole Muhammad Ali bill thing is all bullshit,” said Todd duBoef, president of the storied boxing promotional company Top Rank, whose founder, Bob Arum, used to guide Ali’s career.

Even before Zuffa launched, Arum and White have long had a war of words, but the rivalry has intensified with Zuffa’s arrival. DuBoef asserts that TKO needs the new legislation to ensure that its business models in UFC and Zuffa are similar, with matchups and fighters that are controlled under one company.

“They spend tens of millions of dollars not having to disclose money to their athletes in their core business, which is UFC,” duBoef said. “The only real agenda was to protect the UFC model. They just settled one [antitrust case with UFC] for [almost] $400 million [and] they don’t want to disrupt that. So, they couldn’t have two structures or two architectures on complete opposite ends under one parent company.”

Two-pronged approach

A boxer in his youth, White has always been enamored by that side of combat sports, even if he became famous through UFC. He spoke publicly about his desire to get into boxing promotion as far back as 2017, when Conor McGregor fought Floyd Mayweather.

When he finally announced his boxing promotion last year, White chose the same name he had first floated nearly a decade before in Zuffa. That is the name of the parent company he and the Fertitta brothers founded in 2001 when they bought UFC.

Adding to the strong feelings is that White has constantly described boxing as being in an incessant “going-out-of-business sale,” with irrational economics and dwindling popularity. At the same time, critics of Zuffa think TKO’s bid to expand into boxing is backfiring by reopening a conversation among UFC fighters about whether their pay is too low.

Zuffa has a two-pronged approach toward boxing. As seen with the Canelo Alvarez-Terence Crawford super middleweight title bout last fall, the first part appears to be what TKO has dubbed “super fights” with already established boxing superstars. In those fights, TKO will help promote and the Saudis will underwrite the costs, but the fighters aren’t necessarily signing to join the new Zuffa league, which is the second prong of the strategy.

Shapiro has said publicly that the structure of TKO’s deal with the Saudis involves TKO providing day-to-day management of Zuffa and receiving a $10 million fee in return. He also recently said at a J.P. Morgan investment conference that Zuffa is already profitable and that the Saudi investors want TKO to ramp up this year’s number of events, which had been announced as 16 or 17.

TKO will earn more equity in the venture as it hits certain milestones, and it’s just about to enter the second level of that structure, he added.

“Boxing is ripe for this; I mean, it’s really ripe for this opportunity. It’s been just too scattered, too messed up, too much corruption, too many promoters, too many sanctioning bodies and just too hard as a fan,” Shapiro said.

Nakisa Bidarian, the former CFO of UFC and now co-founder of Most Valuable Promotions, is also getting into MMA. He said TKO’s support of the Ali Revival Act shows that it wants to implement a “UFC-like structure” in boxing. “And I think they either have to consolidate existing promoters to add impact on a short-term basis … [or] it takes seven to 10 years for them to build their own crop of talent to say, ‘Here, we can argue we have the best fighters in the world,’” he added.

Rather than exclusively working with the World Boxing Association, World Boxing Council, World Boxing Organization and International Boxing Federation and using their championship belts as the grand prize, Zuffa has created its own. Part of that comes down to TKO’s belief that the traditional belts have been devalued by the sanctioning bodies giving out too many special and interim titles, confusing fans and diluting the worth of the straps. But it also mirrors the UFC model.

DuBoef is skeptical of Zuffa trying to create its own titles, because “what I hear from [fighters] more anything is they want to work for a world title, they want to fight for the green belt, WBC, WBA, IBF. They want to unify. … That’s the foundational piece of what fighters dream for: Olympic gold and world titles.”

Early impressions

Hardly a week goes by without a new opinion from someone in the boxing industry on whether Zuffa will prove to be a savior or a disaster for boxing.

In a Senate hearing in April, the promoter and former fighter Oscar De La Hoya and Nico Ali Walsh, a boxer who is the grandson of Ali, spoke out against the proposed legislation. They testified before a committee led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and seated next to them was Khan and Timothy Shipman, the president of the Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports.

“One system operates with transparency and accountability, while the [proposed new rules] do not,” De La Hoya said. “This is a fundamental shift in power that, if changed, would put corporate profits first, fighters second. We should be clear about who benefits from this. These changes align directly with what Zuffa Boxing and its leadership at TKO Group Holdings have already said they intend to build in boxing: a model similar to the UFC.”

Khan countered by criticizing boxing’s lack of “structure” that “almost every American sport has,” and said the Ali Revival Act would “give boxers the freedom to choose a better system.” The WWE president, who is across the business side of Zuffa, also told SBJ of the new venture: “We are merely a startup that loves the sport of boxing.”

Bruce Binkow, a consultant for Premier Boxing Champions, was measured in his opinion of how Zuffa’s introduction has gone.

“Anything that happens that brings more audience to boxing is good for us and good for them and good for everyone,” he said. “As far as Zuffa putting on regular shows, that’s what they’re supposed to do; good for them. If they’re going to build a business, that’s how they’re going to have to build it. Right now, we’re focused more on creating bigger events with more high-profile fighters, but it’s all good — the more boxing that’s on television, the better.”

The rules that the CFTC proposed around sports prediction markets Wednesday, which included a ban of pitch-by-pitch micro markets in baseball but did not touch more popular player prop bets across all sports, stemmed from concerns several leagues raised during meetings with the regulator in recent months.

“That feedback certainly factored in,” CFTC Chairman Michael Selig told SBJ in an interview after the regulator posted the 267-page rules proposal on its website. “The comments factored in. We talked to folks on the Hill as well. We talked to folks in state elected official positions, federal elected official positions. We all care about the integrity of sports. We all care about ensuring our markets are free of fraud, manipulation, insider trading and the like.”

The proposal laid out includes a “special rule” that will allow the CFTC to deem certain contracts involving war, terrorism, assassination or gaming -- defined as sporting events and player performance -- as “contrary to the public interest” and subject to additional review. It outlines proposed factors that might lead a sports event contract to pass public interest scrutiny.

Though gambling regulators in some states have banned prop betting on college players and tightened rules around bets on pro players, the CFTC proposal allows for both, describing the potential for their manipulation as “detectable.” It proposed bans on contracts on the outcome of individual pitches, shots and plays.

“We believe these markets are going to exist, whether it’s in the United States or elsewhere,” Selig said. “So if we’re going to have them here in the United States, we want to set clear rules of the road to protect investors, to protect consumers and to make sure that the United States sets the gold standard for prediction markets.”

The CFTC has entered memorandums of understanding to work with MLB and the NHL on regulation and policing of the contracts, which have emerged as a popular sports betting workaround in states that haven’t legalized. It continues to work toward similar agreements with other leagues, Selig said.

As sports properties compete to capture the attention and fandom of the younger generation, CMOs are increasingly prioritizing player storytelling, community connection and authentic fan engagement over traditional marketing tactics.

Four CMOS — the Chicago Stars’ Kay Bradley, LPGA’s Chad Coleman, MLB’s Uzma Rawn Dowler and Rams’ Kathryn Frederick — discussed shifting consumer habits, how organizations are finding their voice and the growing importance of authenticity in a panel moderated by SBJ’s Terry Lefton at SBJ’s Brand Innovation Summit on Tuesday.

Let personality shine

• Coleman said sports properties must think beyond the game itself and focus on the personalities and stories that drive fandom in today’s creator economy.
• Drawing from his experience at Dude Perfect, Coleman noted that audiences are built around people and communities, not just competition: “The golf isn’t necessarily the product — our players are. Our stories of our players. Our personalities are what fans are attracted to, and that’s how you build a community around them.”
• Dowler noted that younger fans increasingly follow players over teams and that leagues must embrace athletes as creators and influencers in their own right.

Invest long-term in youth and community

• Frederick said that rebuilding and growing a fan base in L.A. requires balancing legacy supporters, newer fans and the next generation. She said the organization has focused on youth engagement as a crucial long-term growth strategy: “Do I think I’m going to be more successful converting hearts and minds of the 7-, 8-, 9-year-olds, or am I going to work to unwind someone who’s got Packers fandom at the age of 35?”
• Bradley described a similar challenge, saying the Stars had to overcome the hurdle of establishing itself as “Chicago’s team” following an ownership transition and rebrand while competing in one of the most entrenched sports markets in the world. She said community engagement and local appearances have been key to crossing that bridge.

Creating breakthrough moments

• Coleman pointed to LPGA star Nelly Korda’s recent U.S. Women’s Open victory as an opportunity to introduce the league to new audiences. He said the league worked to place Korda in broader sports and culture conversations, including an appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show”: “We need to be everywhere. We need to be where people are consuming content. We need to show up in unexpected places. We need to really figure out how to break out of that kind of golf bubble.”

Authenticity rules all

• Frederick spotlighted the Rams’ recent draft campaign, which featured a L.A.-inspired parody of the film “Friday” and incorporated longtime fans, local personalities and players. She also noted the organization’s decision in 2025 to move its draft operations to LAFD Air Operations HQ following the area’s devastating wildfires.
• Dowler, an SBJ Forty Under 40 Hall of Famer, said sponsors want customized solutions and meaningful fan connections as opposed to traditional inventory: “We’re not selling inventory; we’re selling solutions.” She cited MLB’s recent partnerships tied to its America 250 campaign, including activations with Ford and Mountain Dew, as examples of creating those connections.

Seizing the moment of the World Cup

• Bradley said the World Cup provides a testing ground like no other for future opportunities across women’s soccer ahead of the 2027 Women’s World Cup in Brazil and the LA28 Games. She noted the Stars will be facilitating activations and community programming tied to the tournament to better understand how fans engage with soccer in the U.S.
• She also emphasized the opportunity to showcase the NWSL’s international player base and reinforce the league’s global identity.

Scott Harniman, the UFL’s SVP/media and innovation, describes the spring football league as an “incubator of technology.”

And what is any tech incubator without a demo day?

That’s essentially what the UFL plans to put on Saturday afternoon in Washington, D.C., during its 2026 championship game — the United Bowl — at Audi Field. This is the UFL’s third season-capping tech showcase since the league launched (in its latest form) in 2024, and it is expecting more than 40 attendees, from league partners to influencers, to take in demonstrations from several of the league’s tech vendors.

“The goal is showing what we can from an innovation standpoint, a technology standpoint,” Harniman told SBJ ahead of the event. “We look forward to it every year.”

Run of show

One change from last year’s showcase is a move from a high-up suite in the venue to one on the field level. The aim is to give attendees a more intimate view of the action, and it could create a unique perspective on demos from companies such as tracking data firm Sportable, which will stream a data-rich alternate feed of the game as it happens using real-time information derived from sensors in the football and on players’ pads.

The suite will also include displays from ESPN (a monitor showing its “Skycast” alt-cast of the game), wearable camera company Povora and playback software DVSport (a station for viewing replay angles that UFL officials use to adjudicate challenges).

FAST takeaways

This is also the second year of the UFL’s FAST (Football Advancement Through Sports Technology) program for testing and launching new innovations.

Year 1 produced the UFL’s ongoing partnership with Sportable. But even when the program doesn’t lead to a longer-term relationship — such as with Mindfly, whose BodyCam product was used on players’ chest plates and shoulder pads last season — there are learnings.

“There were challenges — and, really, not all on their side,” Harniman said of Mindfly. “The physicality of the game and wearing a camera on the chest, it was really hard. ... But we also saw, when we did capture [video], that in-game speed — the audio, the video of collisions — it was so dramatic that wanted to continue.”

So, the UFL pivoted to Povora, which deployed its “CapCam” during the 2026 season on UFL referees and, in a first for the company, even a coach — the Orlando Storm’s Anthony Becht. Povora on Saturday will also debut a new body camera, worn by a member of the chain crew, that automatically pans side-to-side based on the head motion of the person wearing it, powered by a wireless connection to an IMU earpiece.

“We were right in the heart of the action when Anthony was talking to his guys, which is a really unique perspective we were excited to see [on broadcast],” said Povora co-founder and CCO Nathan Horrocks. “We’re also looking at how we can go forward with that. Who else can we use the camera on?”

The UFL’s 2026 FAST class also includes EA Sports, Riddell, The 33rd Team and AI audio firm Vokol, demonstrating the league’s openness to technologies both established and startup.

Co-founder and Head of Growth Chris Shreeve said Vokol generated hundreds of bite-sized, AI-generated podcast episodes for the UFL during the season, predominately based on the league’s editorial coverage. These clips canvassed league/team news and “know before you go” FAQs for fans attending games, with the latter driving a better than 40% click-through rate to additional content, according to Shreeve.

“It’s been as good of a relationship as we possibly could have asked for, and I think it all stems from the top-down mandate they [the UFL] have to innovate,” he said. “They’ve gone above and beyond to try to do something different.”

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Streaming is no longer a fast-growing category within the broader realm of TV viewing. It is increasingly the main way people watch. Consider:

• Nielsen’s December 2025 Gauge found that streaming accounted for 47.5% of total TV viewing that month. On Christmas Day, streaming viewership climbed to 55.1 billion viewing minutes, driven in part by back-to-back NFL games on Netflix plus a late NFL game on Prime Video, alongside the highly anticipated release of new “Stranger Things” episodes.
• An average of 131.7 million viewers tuned into this year’s Super Bowl. And, for the first time, linear TV did not represent a majority of the audience. Streaming did.

Those stats underscore a well-discussed trend: More viewership hours will continue to flood into streaming. But they also mask an underdiscussed reality: Live sports will be the testing ground where providers discover whether their infrastructures are prepared.

Not all streaming content is created equal

Even as streaming dominates viewing habits, it is a mistake to treat “streaming” as one uniform workload. On-demand entertainment can be demanding at scale, especially during big releases, but it has one built-in advantage: The viewer can recover. If playback starts a few seconds late, or quality ramps slowly, the story still unfolds. If something goes wrong, the user can restart. The moment is still there.

Live sports is the opposite.

Sports is the content category where there is no do-over. A buffering wheel during a climactic play is more than an annoyance. It can ruin the event. A quality drop at the wrong moment does not feel like a minor technical blip. It feels like the product failed.

That is why sports is the pressure test for streaming. It compresses every hard requirement into a single experience:

• Massive concurrency that ramps quickly
• Tight expectations around latency and continuity
• High emotional intensity, which amplifies dissatisfaction
• Social context that makes delays and glitches immediately obvious

This is also why “good enough” becomes harder to define in sports. The industry cannot accept poor experiences anywhere, but sports is where the penalty for even small quality of experience (QoE) misses is most severe. Viewers complain in real time, switch services mid-game (if possible), and remember the failure the next time they decide whether to subscribe.

If sports is the harshest workload in streaming, it is also one of the fastest growing. By 2027, digital viewing of live sports will reach 127.4 million viewers in the U.S., a 21% increase from 2024.

That growth matters because it is not simply more viewing time. It is more viewing time concentrated in the format with the least tolerance for delivery imperfections.

In other words, the next phase of streaming growth is not just about winning minutes. It is about sustaining trust in the moments viewers care about most.

Why ‘sports-first’ is the necessary infrastructure mindset

From a streamer standpoint, a sports-first mentality does not mean treating sports as the only priority. It means treating sports as the design center. Because if you can deliver live sports reliably, you can deliver almost anything.

Sports forces streaming platforms to solve for the conditions that create the hardest customer experiences: sudden peaks, geographic hotspots, strict continuity expectations and the need to operate like a service, not a library of content.

That is why modern streaming infrastructure should be built with sports in mind, even when the majority of hours watched are not sports. The architecture choices you make for sports become your quality baseline for everything else.

What sports-first infrastructure requires

A sports-first approach can be summarized as one goal: maintain consistent QoE under chaotic conditions. Achieving that requires a few capabilities working together.

End-to-end visibility, including last-mile visibility: The point is not that issues only occur in the last mile. They do not. Problems can originate in encoding, origin capacity, CDN routing, peering, ISP networks, home networks, devices and apps. The requirement is visibility across the chain, with enough granularity to locate where quality is degrading and enough timeliness to act while the event is still happening. Last-mile visibility matters because it is where QoE is ultimately experienced and where many performance constraints surface, especially under peak load.

A true multi-CDN strategy with real performance steering: Multi-CDN is now table stakes for resilience, but it is only effective when you can make intelligent decisions in real time. Static routing rules are not enough for live events, when conditions shift minute to minute. Sports-first delivery requires telemetry-driven steering that can detect degradation early and shift traffic before the viewer sees it.

This is increasingly challenging in practice. Delivery footprints are not identical. Commercial terms vary. Capacity planning gets harder as traffic becomes spikier and rights packages fragment audiences across more services. The operational complexity is real, but the alternative is brittleness.

Dynamic, on-demand scaling that matches the shape of sports traffic: Sports traffic does not behave like a steady climb. It surges. It clusters. It spikes on kickoff, halftime, overtime, and big moments. Infrastructure needs to scale quickly and economically, without overbuilding for peaks that only last minutes. This is where automation, prepositioning and elastic capacity become strategic.

Delivery optimized specifically for video: Live sports is not a generic web workload. It is a video workload with tight constraints around segment delivery, bitrate stability, startup time, rebuffering and latency targets. Sports-first infrastructure emphasizes video-aware caching behavior, low-latency delivery options where appropriate, and optimization choices that prioritize sustained playback quality over synthetic performance metrics.

When trust is on the line, sports sets the standard

The more TV viewing shifts to streaming, the more the market’s quality expectations will be defined by the moments that carry the highest emotional stakes. Sports is that moment, over and over again. The services that win with sports will not win because they have the most content, but because they can reliably deliver the moments that matter to people.

That reliability is never created by a streamer alone. QoE is the product of a complex delivery chain that includes encoding stacks, CDNs, ISPs, device platforms and countless handoffs in between. But when the stream fails, viewers do not blame the ecosystem. They blame the service on the screen. That’s why streamers have to be relentlessly diligent about selecting delivery partners and architectures that can hold up under the harshest conditions.

A sports-first mentality acknowledges an engineering truth: Build for the hardest workload in the biggest pipe, and you build an experience viewers can trust everywhere else.

Steve Miller-Jones is vice president of product strategy at Netskrt.

• This week’s SBJ Sports Media Podcast features co-host Austin Karp checks in on the NBA Finals, Pat McAfee’s looming payday and the lack of star power at the French Open. He also chats with ESPN’s Sean McDonough about the thrilling Golden Knights-Hurricanes series in the Stanley Cup Final and SBJ soccer reporter Alex Silverman about the FIFA World Cup.
• Karp also reports on several viewership numbers Thursday: Spurs-Knicks delivering 23.8 million viewers on ABC/ESPN in Monday night’s Game 3; the lack of star power hurting the French Open finals; and the Belmont Stakes was down 3% on Fox/FS1 this year.
• Army agreed to a 20-year sponsorship deal with USAA, as SBJ’s Ben Portnoy reports the agreement is believed to be one of the more significant in recent college sports memory and among the most lucrative in the Group of Six.
• UFC star Conor McGregor has been quiet by his standards since his return to the Octagon was announced, but Dana White said he’s “extremely confident” the fight is happening and is pleased that the Irishman has been reserved, writes SBJ’s Adam Stern.
• Puma is using the World Cup to debut the Ultra Nitro 7, its newest soccer cleat. That public rollout began Wednesday, notes SBJ’s Chris Smith.
• Smith also writes that French soccer club Paris Saint-Germain will open its Ici C’est Paris La Maison activation Thursday as part of the club’s efforts to create cultural touch points with soccer fans for the World Cup.
• State Farm introduced AI-powered social content during Wednesday night’s NBA Finals Game 4 featuring Stan — the talking State Farm Stanchion Pad behind the basket — reacting to Knicks-Spurs, notes SBJ’s Joe Lemire.