Who needs Cinderella stories? Apparently not college basketball. The 2025 NCAA Men’s Championship game between first seeds Florida and Houston drew 18.1 million viewers, the highest since 2019 and a 22% increase from last year. Viewership peaked Monday at 21.1 million during the Gators’ thrilling win (or the Cougars’ epic choke), capping a record-breaking Final Four weekend. The three games averaged 16.4 million viewers — up 24% from last year — and Saturday’s semifinals were the most-watched since 2017, both averaging 15.5 million viewers. Florida celebrates after beating Houston in the national championship at the Final Four of the NCAA ... More college basketball tournament, Monday, April 7, 2025, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay) Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved You could argue that fans were excited to watch the best of the best compete. Who cares about David, when four Goliaths are slugging it out for college basketball immortality? But it wasn’t just the Final Four that grabbed ratings. The 2025 NCAA tournament averaged 10.2 million viewers, with even the second round showing its strongest numbers since 1993. Despite blowouts and a lack of upsets, U.S. viewers tuned in as if live sports were the only fun left on TV. Super Bowl 59 told a similar story: Yes, the Philadelphia Eagles curb-stomped the Kansas City Chiefs in a historically lopsided championship game, but the real shock may have been the TV ratings. According to Nielsen an average of 127.7 million Americans tuned into the 40-22 shellacking. That’s a 3.2% bump from last year’s all-time record, and means Super Bowl LIX was the most watched television event in U.S. history by total viewers. NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA - FEBRUARY 09: Jalen Hurts #1 of the Philadelphia Eagles drops back as he ... More looks to pass against the Kansas City Chiefs during Super Bowl LIX at Caesars Superdome on February 09, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images) Getty Images In an era of on-demand entertainment and personalized content streams, live sports events are rare moments of collective experience. The Super Bowl, in particular, is the apotheosis of appointment TV, and remarkably most U.S. viewers kept that appointment even when the score was 24-0 at halftime. Having Kendrick Lamar doesn’t hurt, but the record-breaking viewership speaks to a deeper desire among people to share in the unknown, unscripted, and unabashedly 20th century experience of live broadcasting. And the money generated reflects its enduring allure. Despite some Ye-yips and other commercial curiosities, Fox earned around $800 million in advertising for Super Bowl 59. MORE FOR YOU Google’s Android Update—Bad News For Samsung And Pixel Users ‘NYT Mini’ Clues And Answers For Thursday, April 10 Trump Approval Rating Tracker: Three Post-Tariff Surveys Show Decline The Power of Live We all recognize the excitement of anticipating a big moment—but what continues to draw in viewers who otherwise have cut their cords and retreated to their self-curated echo chambers? It may be an ancient drive for shared rituals. Over 30 years ago, communication scholars Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz proposed that Media Events—think the Olympics, the Oscars, and yes, the Final Four—serve as transformative rituals for modern society. These televised “high holidays” bring people together in real time. In 2025, such rites are rarer and sparsely attended. Sure, you could have tuned in to HBO for the White Lotus finale on Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT, but you most likely streamed it at your convenience on Max. Liveness is the secret sauce of media events—it’s kept Saturday Night on air for over 50 years. This sense of immediacy is more than entertainment; it’s a form of mediated liturgy. Dayan and Katz described these as moments when society temporarily syncs around a shared spectacle. Some are unexpected and tragic, like 9/11. Others are planned and often joyful, like award shows, elections (some of them), and, most popular of all, sports. Today, with so many viewing options, we’re less likely to tune in to these shared moments, especially those that feel overly staged in their liveness (looking at you, Grammys). But in sports the winner isn’t a result read but an outcome determined in real time. No U.S. sporting event is bigger than the Super Bowl. Of the 20 most-watched American broadcasts by average viewership, 19 were the NFL’s championship game, according to Nielsen. But the massive audiences are interested in more than football—they seek co-presence. It’s that shared laughter at commercials, debates over halftime shows, and collective gasps at game-changing plays. In a world of digital echo chambers and asynchronous communication, live sports offer something rare: a shared experience, that appears unscripted, unfiltered, and fleetingly real. Boston College Media Scholar Mike Serazio argues that sports offer a unique antidote to our fragmented, time-shifted world: they demand our attention in real time, immersing us in the now. Live sports pull us into the present, when most days we are worried about the future or re-litigating the past. Unlike bingeable shows or endless scrolling, sports unfold unpredictably, creating communal, emotional investment in outcomes that, while inconsequential to our everyday struggle, feel profoundly significant in the moment and, more importantly, within our imagined community of fandom. It is that unifying culture of shared rules, language, history, colors, that makes live sports events more attractive than ever. We see this when, even though the Eagles are crushing the Chiefs, and the result is beyond doubt, people keep watching. Together we share something that’s fleeting in the contemporary media ecosystem. Sports have the power to unite disparate groups so polarized they cannot agree on facts. But a basket is a basket, a field goal is a field goal, and if there is dispute, we can rely, for the most part, on instant replay. The communal escape from tariffs, trade wars, interest rates, and whatever other RL anxieties are plaguing us make sports the masses’ mediated opiate of choice in the 21st century. Streaming Wars Ironically the power of live sports may prove to be the savior of streaming services in that overcrowded space. It won’t be a subscription fee price war, or who has the most Emmys, but rather ownership of live sports “broadcasts” (with commercial breaks) that will differentiate the winners from the losers. Paramount+, a late-entrant with subpar UX and a critically acclaimed catalogue topped, 77 million subs on the back of the NFL playoff viewing bonanza, far more than its latest Yellowstone spinoffs. Perhaps the company could spin its $8 billion merger with Skydance Media into a reality show to rival Hard Knocks? Across the pond, Amazon’s “quiet attempt to reinvent pay-per-view” through soccer is turning heads. The company’s Prime streaming has begun offering French Ligue 1 games to viewers in England for the low price of £2.49 ($3.13). The move is seen as a test run for potentially streaming on-demand soccer on a larger scale through the platform. How will this play against Netflix Premier League aspirations or British streamer DAZN’s claim to be the “home” of sports in Europe? Amazon’s fútbol investment remains paltry compared to the $1 billion it pays per season to stream 16 NFL games on Thursday Night Football. It reportedly paid another $100 million to claim the Black Friday game, a masterstroke for keeping deal-hungry shoppers out of their competitors’ brick and mortar. As if usurping Thanksgiving weekend wasn’t enough, the NFL has yoinked Christmas from the NBA’s decades-long grasp. In 2024 the yuletide stream amassed over 60 million viewers. This Christmas it will feature a Netflix football double-header, with Amazon providing the night cap, eggnog not included. But don’t feel too bad for the Association. Once Thursday Night Football concludes, Amazon will stream NBA games as part of an 11-year, $76 Billion deal it’s splitting with Disney and Comcast. TL;DR: More sports than ever will be streamed in 2025. This may be the watershed year for streaming sports, but expect intensifying rights races as deep-pocketed tech companies vie for control of the last surviving media events—those once ubiquitously broadcast, now sought after rituals of communion and faith. In 2029, the NFL can opt out of its current $110 billion media rights deal, which may finally pull the cord on cable TV. And for those dubious pre-millennials clinging stubbornly to their coaxial (It’s okay; I am one!) here’s the kicker: In 2025 YouTube is projected to surpass Disney as the largest media company on earth. It’s not so much the unboxing influencers, Minecraft streamers, or pratfall content creators, that are pushing the revenue of Google’s video sharing platform above Mickey Mouse. Instead, it’s the same product that sold radios, televisions, and newspapers in the 20th century: live sports. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website. Editorial StandardsForbes Accolades