It’s been well reported that TikTok streamed select live sporting events, including player-focused MLS alt feeds and portions of FIFA World Cup matches, earlier this year.

But over the last 90 days, the short-form video platform has quietly started to include full, primary event broadcasts within users’ feeds.

“The same algorithmic feed that created countless new celebrities & consumer businesses is now coming for live content. This is beyond disruptive,” former MVP Chief Strategy Officer Mitch Glaser said.

Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions (MVP) billed its August 21 card featuring Amanda Serrano vs. Lucrecia Manzur as the first championship boxing production to air live on TikTok. 

“We gave them the full show––the main event, everything. [And] it performed incredibly well because the TikTok community discovered our broadcast by simply scrolling their main feed,” Glaser said. “Over 100m impressions and incredible engagement amongst a demo that was 68% under the age of 35.”

It’s believed the experience will prompt TikTok to add more live sporting events and that other social discovery platforms could follow suit, potentially creating several new distributional channels for rights owners.

“TikTok is seeing platform benefits to having professionally generated content in their live product,” Glaser said. “Eventually, I would expect that Instagram, X and YouTube will lean in more as well.”

TikTok’s move to include live premium IP within a user’s personalized ‘for you’ content feed is a noteworthy media development.  

For the first time, someone on the platform “will be scrolling like normal and land in a live sports broadcast,” Glaser said. “This changes streaming [on] social platforms from easy to access and free to view to easy to access, free to view and highly discoverable.”

And games and events airing on TikTok now have the potential to ‘go viral’ while they’re still live.

“If the stream is performing well, if the content is engaging, it's going to go up the algorithmic ranking and appear in more users’ feeds,” Glaser said.

That is meaningfully different from how users discover content on Instagram (IG) or YouTube (YT). On IG, only live streams from accounts users follow appear at the top of their feeds, while YT viewers generally must seek out live video programming themselves.

“People are overlooking how powerful this is because people have streamed to social platforms and creator channels for years––a model built on building followers via accessing someone else’s [audience],” Glaser said (see: Kings League). “TikTok, [by contrast, has] exploded in popularity by pioneering the interest-based algorithm for short-form content; where users are shown [video programming] they’re interested in, not from someone they follow.”

Of course, appearing in users’ social media feeds means premium sports IP is now vying for viewer attention with the endless user-generated videos found on discovery platforms.

“To be clear, they already are competing against this content, but on these platforms that content is one swipe away,” Glaser said.

While that may be scary for executives, it should benefit younger fans uninterested in watching a core live broadcast presentation that hasn’t evolved much in 50 years and fails to reflect how they consume media.

Tier one properties commanding meaningful rights fees are not going to ––and should not–– pivot away from the established pay TV system. However, all recognize next-gen fans are not regularly consuming content on those channels, either. 

“Average live audience ages, across every major league, have aged up seven to 10 years since 2016,” Glaser said.

And know that nearly half of all sports fandoms are formed by age 14 (see: Two Circles’ research). 

So, most owners and operators understand there is an urgency to find alternative methods of reaching and engaging younger demos. 

Nearly all T1 properties already distribute shoulder programming, like watch parties and pre-game shows, across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. But the expectation is that as social-first platforms increasingly incorporate live sports into users’ feeds, many will rethink how they use those channels.

The top properties will likely “start by getting creative with alternative formats and increasingly use [TikTok and the others] as a discovery mechanism, as FIFA and Fox did with WC26,” Glaser said. “They may [also] explore new formats like game shows, challenges and tournaments that activate new communities and deepen engagement and loyalty. There’s so much more that can be done to captivate young fans where they live [beyond] posting clips of games and interviews.”

Eventually, mobile-exclusive carve-outs will become a part of their media rights negotiations.

“Discovery [platforms] can work hand in glove with live sport, even as it disrupts other content, such as library entertainment,” JohnWallStreet Advisory advisor and Crakes Media founder Patrick Crakes said. “Distribution is abundant. Creating audiences is the harder part. [Rights owners and holders can] use discovery to build those audiences and make the overall rights business more valuable—[as opposed to] simply move viewing around.”

But challenger properties without large, guaranteed rights fees may want to consider incorporating TikTok into their distribution strategy sooner rather than later.

These rights owners are “going to have to build a passionate fan base from the ground up with storytelling and entertainment,” Glaser said. “To [construct] a sustainable business and create enterprise value, [they] will need to bring in views delivered by the algorithm and create a sticky, compounding fanbase [that tunes in] event after event. The only way to do that is by building your product for the audience that lives on those channels.”

MVP did that by featuring popular streamers throughout the broadcast to ‘stop the scroll’. It also leveraged compelling hooks and visual attention hacks, and tried to kill as much downtime as possible, as any good creator would.

TikTok has demonstrated its ability to deliver both the scale and younger audiences sports properties are looking to reach. MVP was able to convert many of the users who discovered the broadcast into followers of the promotion and its athletes.

“During the broadcast, whenever the winner was announced and a fighter had their hand raised, TikTok floated a little bubble up that urged fans to follow the individual,” Glaser said. “And the viewer could, right in the broadcast, hit the button and follow them. [That] is incredibly powerful because now a viral moment can more effectively be converted into brand value.”

While TikTok is not paying meaningful rights fees and has not yet shown there is a viable way for rights owners to generate significant income on the platform, the latter could be changing. Several promising new revenue streams have emerged alongside direct advertising and sponsorship.

“Live selling conversion is orders of magnitude greater than a standard online store. Being able to sell merchandise with one click as you’re watching an event [actually] has the ability to move the needle for some properties,” Glaser said. “Additionally, gifting has become huge as well.”

Gifting is the practice of viewers sending money to creators during live streams via the purchase of virtual gifts. TikTok facilitated several billion dollars’ worth of these gifts in 2025. 

Discovery platforms aren’t going to become the primary home for the big four rights anytime soon.

But “over time, and for startup leagues whose success depends on the next-gen sports fan, TikTok and others like it can be the best place to launch and scale a business,” Glaser said.

On the latest episode of JaneWallStreet Presents: At The Table, a biweekly podcast exploring the intersection of sports, media, and finance through the lens of (mostly) female decision-makers, JaneWallStreet Executive Chair Deirdre Lester sits down with Premier Lacrosse League Co-Founder, President and Chief Creative Officer Paul Rabil.

The two surface and discuss a range of actionable insights, including how challenger leagues can use their first media deal to build a case for the next one, why they should build an investor base that brings more than capital and why pro leagues are best positioned to rebuild recreational sports.

📺 Watch the full episode on JohnWallStreet’s YouTube page.
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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