Sports broadcasting rights are sold on one principle. Whoever pays for the licence broadcasts the game, and nobody else may legally stream it. The US company Creator Sports Network is building a second floor alongside this exclusivity. On it, a creator streams the same live game on their own channel, in parallel with television.
Co-founder Barrick Prince, who previously led original content development at Twitch, describes the firm in classic television vocabulary. CSN is the network, and creators are its affiliate stations. In traditional TV, an affiliate is a transmitter covering a region. At CSN, an affiliate is a person with a community, and the game lives directly on their channel.
How the window is built
According to an interview with Sports Video Group, CSN works with more than a thousand creators across eight sports and eight languages, for partners ranging from the Bundesliga to the Savannah Bananas.
Within a single creator window, the firm sells rights in three forms. The first are creator rights, where a vetted creator broadcasts to their community via YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, X and Facebook. The second are athlete rights, where the player becomes a broadcaster. The third are keyhole rights, meaning a raw feed from a single angle that runs alongside the main signal.
The key word of the whole structure is “alongside”. Prince puts it this way: the creator window is negotiated around exclusive contracts, not inside them. Creators bring the rights holder a new young audience and a new revenue stream alongside the primary exclusive feed.
Where a contract covers all digital rights, CSN, according to Prince, does not operate in that competition until the rights are released. The rights holder is always responsible for compliance with the contracts.
Who is watching
Prince rejects the objection that creators are taking audiences away from traditional broadcasters, and points to the make-up of the audience instead. Across the creators, sports and languages the firm operates, roughly 90% of the audience is aged 18 to 34, with an average viewing time of over 15 minutes. That is a demographic that has largely left linear television.
The scale is shown by the case of the Savannah Bananas, an exhibition baseball team with a large reach on social networks. More than 60 creators broadcast a single game of theirs at once, each for their own community on their own channel, running in parallel with broadcasts on ESPN, ABC, Disney+, The CW and TNT Sports.
In March 2026 the team signed a standalone package with CSN for exclusive creator rights to four live games of the Banana Ball Championship League. The team's founder, Jesse Cole, commented that “Creator Sports Network shares the same innovative spirit to bring sports to fans through the unique lens of creators”.
What is already running
For the Bundesliga the goal was growth in Canada, where the league already had broadcast partners DAZN and OneSoccer. CSN built parallel windows around creators from the football and gaming community, namely ZwebackHD, Box2Box and Bugs. According to John Wall Street, these were three creators with 1.35 million followers combined.
Brazil is a different kind of deal. CSN obtained North American rights to Brasileirão Série A, to broadcast, via creators on their own channels, one selected game a week in English and Spanish, valid through the 2026 season. Prince summed it up: “the power is in the model itself instead of any individual creator and taps into a new class of digital voices”.
Athlete rights take the firm all the way into university sport. In an interview with John Wall Street, Prince claims that the future is a state in which “every single college athlete [will be] broadcasting the games they are playing in”, and that athletes are, in his words, “distribution channels, just like a traditional TV channel or local ABC affiliate”.
Where the money comes from
The model does not rest primarily on the classic rights fee. The revenue comes mainly from brands. It works because the broadcasts are live and driven by chat. Instead of a thirty-second spot that the viewer skips, the brand is visible inside the broadcast, through graphic overlays, chat activations and collaboration with the creator. Prince describes this as selling attention rather than selling impressions.
The precursor to this logic is older than it seems. According to Prince, Amazon showed interest years ago when it let creators stream Thursday Night Football in parallel, a show he helped build on Twitch. What was missing, he says, was the infrastructure that would make this repeatable for anyone who is not Amazon.
A precedent from the World Cup
Prince returns to the 2026 World Cup to discuss whether creator broadcasts add audiences or take them away. The final on FOX drew 38.9 million viewers, the most-watched soccer telecast in US television history.
At the same time, Brazil's CazéTV held the rights to all 104 matches of the tournament and streamed them for free online. Creator broadcasts therefore ran alongside record television coverage, according to Prince, without taking any audience away from it.
CazéTV, which is run by the agency LiveMode with creator Casimir Miguel, is however more a Brazilian one-off than a template. It arose from a convergence of conditions that do not transfer elsewhere: a traditional broadcaster without a digital strategy, a market with huge internet penetration, and one generational talent. The difference with CSN is that it is building a window for creators across many competitions, whereas CazéTV stayed with a single flagship project in one market.
Beside television, in parallel with it
The firm describes itself as a creator-led broadcaster that opens a new window for rights alongside linear television, streaming and free FAST channels. Prince summed up this vision for Dexerto as “abundance, not limitation, where technology allows leagues, teams and media rights holders to coexist with creators”, and frames the future as “one million ESPNs”.
For the European market, the important point is that the model does not assume taking over existing rights. In Europe, paid platforms and national broadcasters hold the football rights, but even there many matches remain outside the main spotlight, away from home territories or buried in the schedule. This is precisely the scarcely distributed supply that the creator window targets.
Prince puts one question to rights holders. They are aiming at a generation that builds its fandom through clips and creators, without ever sitting down to a scheduled broadcast. Whoever reaches that audience first licenses their games to a viewer who is only now arriving.
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