What Is TNT Sports Without The NBA?
After Sports Business Journal reported this week that the NBA is formalizing new media rights deals with Amazon, Disney and NBCUniversal, it’s natural to wonder what exactly happens to TNT Sports.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s sports business is more than just the NBA. But the company’s NBA coverage on TNT (in particular, with the acclaimed Inside the NBA) is a core part of the network’s identity, and that basketball expertise is also what makes its men’s March Madness coverage such a natural fit.
Without the NBA, it makes less sense to keep basketball-focused broadcasting talent on board, especially given the WBD’s cost-cutting focus. And that could conceivably imperil the company’s involvement in the next NCAA Tournament media rights negotiation.
That could eventually anoint the NHL as TNT Sports’ primary sports property, with an assortment of MLB games and non-World Cup U.S. soccer contests in the background. The company will also sublicense some College Football Playoff games from ESPN. But those are just expensive one-off affairs that don’t require long-term coverage investment.
The big question, then, becomes: What exactly is the greater value of TNT Sports to its parent company?
On top of sports’ value to cable channels TNT and TBS (and to a lesser extent, truTV), access to sports rights help differentiate Bleacher Report on digital, and also provide the streaming business with an additional $10-per-month revenue source on Max. Audiences are invested when they’re getting nine months of NBA content, along with NHL, MLB and U.S. soccer games. Just having a couple College Football Playoff games isn’t going to make that up. But it seems unlikely that consumers will be willing to pay the same dollar amount for less content.
TNT Sports isn’t doomed without the NBA, but there also aren’t any premium rights up for grabs in the next few years. To bolster the sales pitch to audiences, perhaps they pay to increase the breadth of existing packages with MLB and the NHL. But realistically, lesser leagues and sublicensing are the only liferafts.
The sublicensing solution, in particular, comes under further scrutiny when you consider the upcoming Venu sports streaming endeavor between ESPN, Fox and WBD.
If those three are operating a streaming service together, one would think they’re relatively equal partners. But if “all” WBD is offering is NHL rights (which ESPN has more of), MLB (ESPN and Fox have) and soccer (Fox has World Cup), then… does March Madness, should they retain it long-term, become the only real draw for TNT Sports’ involvement? And if that’s the case, are they really needed here since the tournament’s only a few weeks long?
Because ESPN and Fox are also the primary partners that WBD would be able to sublicense sports rights from, too. So those sublicenses become pointless in the Venu environment if the service takes off, since Venu flattens rights to an extent and makes the separation between network groups more redundant.
The result leaves TNT Sports in an unenviable spot.
Cost-cutting has driven a lot of consolidation within WBD’s business already, but sports have largely avoided the axe until the reported loss of NBA rights. With that likely coming to fruition soon, it suddenly becomes much easier to see a reality where sports is deemphasized for the sake of the company’s bottom line since it’s the easiest remaining large item to cut.
That won’t happen overnight. But without a splashier replacement than a couple sublicensed CFP games (and maybe it happens in the coming years), it almost feels inevitable at this point.
