How you will watch NBA games in the future
The NBA playoffs are drawing to a close. But behind the scenes, an equally competitive, high-stakes contest is just beginning over who will televise the league into the next decade. The price tag is expected to be over $5 billion a year.
Currently, Walt Disney Co., home of ABC and ESPN, and Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., owner of TNT, are in an exclusive negotiating window to renew their contracts with the NBA. The current deals expire in 2025, and executives at the two companies are waiting for the league to decide what packages of games it will sell. Meanwhile, just about every other major media company — and some technology giants — have expressed interest in making bids once the exclusive window ends next spring.
Currently, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery pay about $2.7 billion a year combined to broadcast NBA games to a national audience. With all the additional bidders lining up, the league is poised to rake in even more money under the next round of contracts.
“I would expect NBA rights to more than double and potentially quite a bit more,” said Ed Desser, a sports media consultant and former NBA executive who has negotiated the league’s previous media deals.
While regular season NBA ratings
were flat, viewership for the playoffs has been the highest in years, and live sports are almost single handedly keeping the cable-TV business alive. With the NFL, MLB and NHL having already renewed their media contracts, the NBA is the last major US sports deal up for grabs for years to come.
This time around, the league is expected to sell its rights to more than two companies. It could carve out games for a streaming service that include international rights or, perhaps, games that previously aired on the
beleaguered regional sports networks, according to a person familiar with the league’s thinking.
To reach as many fans as possible, the league wants more games to be shown on free broadcast stations, such as ABC, NBC, Fox or CBS. And when games do appear on cable channels, which are rapidly losing subscribers, the league will likely want to air those contests on streaming services simultaneously in order to pull in additional viewers.
Last month at the CAA World Congress of Sports conference, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said the next go-round will “most likely be some sort of hybrid,” mixing broadcast, cable and streaming options.
Based on interviews with 10 sports media executives familiar with the league’s negotiations, here’s an assessment of the potential bidders and how it might all shake out.
Disney
Pros: To many, Disney is the favorite to keep the rights. It has the full suite to offer — a broadcast channel in ABC, a cable channel in ESPN and a streaming service in ESPN+. ESPN has a history with the NBA that goes back four decades and a close relationship with the league. Disney CEO Bob Iger is a NBA fan who has known Commissioner Silver
since the 1990s. The ties run deep. When the NBA resumed its 2020 Covid-disrupted season, it did so at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex.
Cons: While ESPN wants to put games on ESPN+
to grow the service, which has about 25 million subscribers, the league may push for games to be on streaming outlets with a larger reach — such as Disney+, which has about 46 million subscribers in the US and Canada.
Warner Bros. Discovery
Pros: Warner Bros. Discovery also has a close relationship with the NBA. The company airs NBA games on TNT. It jointly manages the league’s digital assets. It owns Bleacher Report and House of Highlights, two digital properties that promote the NBA to younger fans. And it broadcasts a popular studio show, Inside the NBA.
In November, CEO David Zaslav told an investor conference that “we don’t need the NBA.” Even so, he and Luis Silberwasser, the head of the sports unit who this month attended multiple playoff games, have made clear that they would like to hold onto NBA rights.
At a recent conference hosted by SVB MoffettNathanson, Zaslav said he was “hopeful that we’ll get a deal done” but added “it’ll probably look a little different.”
Cons: In the next deal, NBA executives want to prioritize free over-the-air broadcast stations — something Warner Bros. Discovery can’t offer. The company’s streaming service,
Max, has yet to prove it can broadcast a major live sporting event. Also, the company has massive debt from its merger last year, raising questions of whether it can afford to pay billions of dollars more for NBA games. Observers believe Zaslav will try to thread the needle: renewing with the league but for fewer games, thereby saving money while also satisfying contracts with cable-TV operators that require TNT to show a certain number of games.