Commissioner Adam Silver provided his most definitive hint today that the NBA could have a national streaming RSN platform as soon as the 2025-26 season, admitting the topic was discussed comprehensively during this afternoon’s Board of Governors meeting and that the league will spend the next six months "intensively studying what the opportunity is."
Asked today about a harsh email last July from
James Dolan — when the Knicks owner called the league’s new
$77B media rights deal the potential "ruination" of the RSN model — Silver was quick to point out that, prior to that national deal, 18 of the league’s RSN had already gone defunct or entered bankruptcy. He then painted a rosier picture for the future, referencing a temporary 30-to-40% "dip" in local rights fees for 13 NBA teams due to Diamond Sports Group’s Chapter 11 but also "an interest" from streaming services that should increase rights fees shortly thereafter.
His comments lend even more credence to league-wide sentiment that either Amazon, Roku, YouTube — or some other streaming entity — will eventually take a conglomerate of between 15 and 20 teams and create a national streaming RSN somewhat similar to what the NFL does with Sunday Ticket. As of now, the league and Diamond have a court-approved single-year agreement to broadcast local games for those 13 NBA teams for this coming season, but that didn’t stop Silver from talking idealistically about the future.
"For me at least, I think we will emerge in a very good place," Silver said at his post-BOG news conference. "… I think coming out of this, when we look at the interest of streaming services to carry local games and all the additional functionality that will come to that, there will be a transition and transition for our viewers, as well, in terms of how they discover those games and how they watch them, that I think the end result will be a much better consumer experience.
"When you can personalize and customize those experiences, when you no longer have the shelf space concerns, for example -- think about not so long ago when we were doing our schedule, if Friday night is ESPN or Thursday night is TNT, obviously by definition in the old days it can only be one game, and for the most part because of the complexity of our schedule we've got to plan that game months and months in advance without knowing how well that team is going to be playing, who could be injured, if there's going to be trades or whatever else. Now without a shelf space constraint, Friday night, what's on. So [with a national streaming RSN] a lot more choice for viewers, and then as I said, a lot more ability to do new and different things."
Silver even indirectly alluded to Dolan, or at least Dolan’s discontent. Part of why the Knicks owner has sent separate contentious emails to the Board of Governors over the past two months, with passive aggressive jabs at Silver, is because he wants no part of the revenue sharing that will certainly come with the new $77B national media deal.
Every time a Knicks game is exclusively on a national network — which can only happen 12 times a season under the current ESPN/TNT media deal — Dolan loses local broadcast income, as well as local sponsorship and signage revenue. But under the new pending media rights deal, the max number a team can lose a local game broadcast to a national telecast is expected to increase to 18 times, costing Dolan more money and almost penalizing him for having a desirable team. Silver even pointed that out today.
For that reason, getting every team to a national streaming RSN may not be feasible in the near term. But, eventually, sources said the hope is that even the Knicks join the conglomerate, if it can somehow, some way be worth their while financially.
"I'll just end by saying that pound for pound, the greatest value in sports rights is in the market of that team," Silver said today. "You're here in the New York market; the Knicks are clearly a national and global brand in terms of basketball. The most intensive interest in the New York Knicks, not surprisingly, is in the New York market. So it shouldn't be that when we finish this process that rights are worth more per viewer outside of the New York region than in New York.
