New NBA Media Deal: 11 years, $77B with Disney (ABC/ESPN), Comcast (NBC/Peacock), and Amazon. ESPN to license Inside the NBA

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WBD Sports wants to stay with the NBA​

The NBA should expect Warner Bros. Discovery to be aggressive in trying to keep its rights, WBD Sports Chair and CEO Luis Silberwasser told me. “We love our relationship with the NBA,” he said. “We love the business that we have with them, and we look forward to a very bright future.”

Silberwasser’s comments come about three months after his boss, WBD CEO David Zaslav, told a roomful of investors that WBD did not “have to have the NBA” -- a comment that some took as a sign that WBD could be preparing for life without the league.

WBD Sports also is facing growing competition for those rights, as Amazon, Apple, Fox and NBC privately have signaled their interest in picking up NBA rights -- as has ESPN, which currently carries its own package of rights.

Speaking a day before the NBA All-Star Game in Salt Lake City, Silberwasser said that league officials leading the negotiations already know how much WBD wants to keep those rights when they come up after the 2024-25 season.

During the interview, Silberwasser pointed to how omnipresent WBD Sports was during All-Star weekend as an example of its commitment to the league, from the company’s high-level talent like Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal to the alternate telecasts it produced for the game to Bleacher Report and House of Highlights content that promoted the event all week.

Silberwasser: “I understand the noise out there. But I do hope that people see our commitment to the rights that we have and our commitment to making those rights better than they've ever been. If we were not interested in a long-term relationship with the NBA, we wouldn't be doing the things that we're doing. When we speak to our league partners, they know it.”

Silberwasser also spoke of the NBA’s long history with the Turner networks, which started in 1989. “It's part of our DNA,” he said. “It's 40 years of history that we have with the NBA. You can see it here in Salt Lake City. You can see that the way we treat this event is not just one more game or one more weekend, but something that is very special.”
 
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