Why have sports rights kept inflating even as the pay-TV bundle declines?

Live sports is the last content genre that aggregates mass simultaneous audiences and is nearly DVR-proof and piracy-resistant in real time, so it is uniquely valuable for advertising and for reducing churn. Meanwhile the bidder pool has EXPANDED - legacy broadcasters defending their remaining bundle economics now compete with streamers using sports to drive subscriber acquisition and ad-tier scale, and leagues run auctions among them. Scarcity plus more strategic bidders equals price inflation that can outrun the underlying ad/affiliate economics; for rights buyers, sports can be individually margin-dilutive but portfolio-rational if it retains subscribers. For leagues, rights behave like a long-duration royalty on live attention.