Few channels have even been able to dream about passing up ESPN on the budget scale, as the sports giant expectedly pays out exorbitant amounts of money for all the licensing fees needed to air the plethora of sporting events shown on a year basis. (And that's even without most of the NFL schedule.) Netflix, meanwhile, has largely only dipped into sports programming from a documentary standpoint, and its billions have gone mostly to scripted projects across all genres. And in 2018, the company is estimated to reach a financial threshold of $7-7.6 billion to be spend on programming, which is expected to overtake ESPN's financial plans, which will likely be lower than the $7.3 billion average its put up in the recent past.