NBA’s New Media Rights Deals Would Let League Have It Both Ways
On top of simply maximizing the amount of money live sports rights can offer, league negotiations with media partners over the last few years have centered on striking the balance between traditional TV and streaming.
For the NFL and many college conferences, they’re richer and still firmly entrenched in linear broadcast and cable. The NHL’s most recent contract grew its network exposure (from NBC to ESPN/ABC and TNT) and parked its NHL.TV out-of-market game product on ESPN+. MLB has been chopping up portions of its rights to streaming services while its linear TV footprint appears to be shrinking. MLS pulled the whole thing off of traditional TV in favor of a lucrative deal with Apple TV+.
For the NBA, the goals are obviously to increase TV payouts from media partners. But also to thread the needle between maximizing dollars and exposure on linear networks, while making sure to land at least one advantageous streaming partner.
If the reporting is to be believed so far(and it should be), the league seems ready to strike the perfect balance — if not a better one than initially assumed.
According to the Wall Street Journal (linked directly above), NBC is preparing a deal for $2.5 billion per year that would effectively steal away Warner Bros. Discovery’s portion of the NBA’s rights. Disney appears ready to retain its share of NBA rights for $2.6 billion. And deep-pocketed Amazon has the outline of a significant streaming deal as well, according to The Athletic.
If Amazon’s paying anywhere near what NBC and Disney are reported to annually, the NBA is tripling its annual U.S. TV revenues — which is in line with its aims stated back in 2021.
Just as importantly, though, a deal with NBC could theoretically see the league significantly increase its TV reach.
While the NBA’s TNT product is popular among fans, cable audiences still aren’t as large as those on the Big Four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC), so trading TNT for NBC means more exposure and greater marketability toward casual viewers, too. And though Amazon Prime Video can’t be considered analogous to cable just yet, it’s growing raft of sports rights make it an increasingly easier hub for fans to tune into.
That, plus the fact that Disney and NBC both have footholds in streaming as well, make a potential Amazon/Disney/NBC deal a perfect development for the NBA — having its cake and eating it too when it comes to both broadcast and streaming.
The NBA is country’s second-most popular pro league, yet spends much of its regular season on cable while sitting behind the NFL in the sports pecking order. A new TV deal wouldn’t suddenly draw the NBA even with the NFL. But you can see how a more robust presence across broadcast and a major streaming service (that many consumers already have) allow it to become an even more “national” product year-round.
Once the NBA’s new TV rights deals all become official, we’ll get a better sense of what that “national” product will look like. And while there’s still the lingering questions around how the league handles regional sports networks, the money and exposure can paper those questions over for a little while. Amazon already being in the fold would also seem to set up an easier way to have its League Pass service built into Prime Video, too, and alleviate those future RSN concerns.
All-in-all, the NBA appears to be sitting in an incredibly enviable spot from a media rights perspective — and at exactly the right time as it’s staring down possible league expansion and what happens to fan interest without stars like LeBron James in the coming years.
