The CW will stream NASCAR O’Reilly races exclusively in the ESPN app

It is vanishingly rare that streaming bundling deal announcements announce anything other than incoming irritation, but I think there’s actually a potentially interesting pattern emerging here.

The CW is the lucky little network with the broadcast rights for the NASCAR O’Reilly Series. They got NASCAR’s best racing product, so they created the best NASCAR broadcast, and quickly this became the only unmitigated success story in NASCAR media. There is in fact a CW app, which is free and ad-supported, and non-race sessions, onboards, and their Battle Cam commentary-free broadcast are streamed on it, but to watch the actual race broadcast, you have to watch on live TV or its digital bundle equivalents. Not everybody pays for that, though, preferring to selectively and directly stream only the things they’re interested in, and until now there was no way to do that for O’Reilly races on the CW.

What the CW has — I think wisely — done is, rather than create their own paid streaming service that would have no chance in hell, they have made a deal with ESPN to stream on their service. The ESPN app doesn’t really have any big sports yet, but it is gradually assembling an eclectic mix that could make it worthwhile for some sports fans to at least throw it into a Disney/Hulu bundle. If ESPN wants to get motorsports into the mix, O’Reilly is a big get.

Now, the people in charge at bigger networks than the CW won’t want to hear this, but they’re never going to get enough subscribers for their bespoke streaming services, either. More of them should consider making deals with streaming services people do subscribe to — or at least ones that have clear value propositions for sports fans — for exclusive streaming of the sports they have TV broadcast rights for.

IMSA is probably the best case study here. Everybody in the U.S. who watches IMSA knows that Peacock isn’t moving the needle. Apple TV — which is moving the needle with Formula 1 — already has some kind of bundling arrangement with Peacock that lets Apple TV subscribers get Peacock at a discount, so they already have a distribution-sharing relationship. Apple is making big moves for U.S. race fans. NBC is not. Why doesn’t Apple pay NBC to let Apple TV stream IMSA directly? Who wouldn’t like that?