Catalist Sports grants Kalshi exclusive US prediction-market rights to live streams and low-latency sports data
Announced 8 September 2026, Catalist Sports granted Kalshi exclusive US prediction-market access to Infront-sourced live streams and low-latency data covering 65,000+ tennis matches plus international soccer, basketball and ice hockey, on a multi-year deal. Sportsbook and Canadian uses stay outside the grant, making prediction markets a distinct sales channel.
Where the rake sits
Catalist keeps an undisclosed fee for the exclusive US prediction-market slice; Infront and the underlying leagues keep the upstream rights economics. Kalshi does the work that turns the feed into tradable contracts and keeps the trading fees, so this is buyer-enriched: Catalist has no claim on those fees, owned or on loan. The live question is under-capture, whether the exclusivity fee priced what Kalshi earns on markets settled with the feed. How the fee splits between Catalist and Infront is not disclosed.
What happened
- Announced 8 September 2026 by Catalist Sports and Kalshi as a multi-year, first-of-its-kind agreement.
- Grant is narrowly scoped: exclusive US prediction-market access to live streams plus official low-latency data for creating, managing and settling contracts.
- Tennis coverage spans 65,000+ matches annually including World Tennis Tour, Australian Open and Davis Cup, alongside international soccer, basketball and ice hockey.
- Catalist is the licensed US distributor of Infront Sports & Media content, not the underlying rightsholder; sportsbook and Canadian channels remain outside the grant.
- Kalshi is the CFTC-regulated designated contract market that holds ~90-95% share of US prediction markets, valued at $22B (Series F, May 2026), with reported ~$52B in event contracts.
- Catalist calls the deal explicit recognition of prediction markets as a distinct distribution channel for premium sports content, separate from sportsbooks.
Who is involved
Catalist Sports is a licensed supplier of official sports data, live streaming and trading solutions.
Kalshi is a prediction market platform.
The reading
Catalist aggregates and licenses the upstream rights (official data for 65,000+ annual tennis matches from the ITF World Tennis Tour, Australian Open and Davis Cup, plus Ligue 1, Brasileirao, basketball and ice hockey streams) and ships low-latency feeds; Kalshi takes those feeds and builds, prices and settles the event contracts its traders pay fees on. The work that turns the feed into the paid-for product sits with Kalshi.
The substrate is worth something to Kalshi because official, low-latency scoring is what lets it open, manage and settle tennis contracts without disputes, and the exclusive video keeps traders inside its app rather than routing to Polymarket, which already has a Sportradar deal across 20-plus leagues. Kalshi's decision it feeds is which sports contracts to list and how to settle them with integrity (Catalist cites ITIA guideline compliance).
What crossed: a time-bound, US-prediction-market-exclusive licence to Catalist's streams and official data feeds for the named competitions. What did not: the underlying rightsholder relationships (Infront's portfolio, the ITF, Tennis Australia, the ITTF federations) stay with Catalist, and Kalshi gets no ownership of the data or the right to resell it.
Not determinable from the public record - the fee, revenue share (if any), exclusivity scope beyond 'US prediction markets' and renewal terms are undisclosed, so whether Catalist priced the exclusive against the scale of Kalshi's sports volume cannot be judged from the announcement.
Why it matters
The interesting move here isn't the streaming or the data; it's that Catalist has sliced 'US prediction-market use' out of a rights bundle as a standalone commercial object, distinct from sportsbook, distinct from Canada, distinct from the underlying league rights. That slice only exists because someone decided to draw the boundary there — and Kalshi is willing to pay for exclusivity because prediction-market settlement depends on trusted official data, which is a different substrate requirement than a sportsbook's. Author to sharpen: is this a story about how channel-level exclusivity becomes the unit of monetisation once a new buyer category emerges, or about how the middleman's whole business is the boundary-drawing itself?
The argument this deal tests: Data monetisation: three routes to value creation
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Sources
- g3newswire.com — primary
- catalistsports.com — party background
- catalistsports.com — party background
- britannica.com — party background
- finance.yahoo.com — party background
Announced 2026-09-08