Another day, another new possibility in the ongoing saga of the future NBA media rights packages. Yesterday, Sports Business Journal reported the NBA would soon formalize their agreements with The Walt Disney Company/ESPN, Comcast/NBCUniversal/NBC/Peacock and Amazon for rights which would begin after next season. There has been much speculation about the matching rights Warner Bros. Discovery has in their deal and most of the chatter has been related to them possibly trying to match NBC’s bid. A new report from CNBC’s Alex Sherman says it might be the Amazon package for Prime Video that NBC tries to match.
It is clear WBD prefers to keep a rights agreement with the NBA for TNT, a partnership which goes back nearly 40 years. However, as Sherman points out there is the matter of their $42 billion gross debt. This may be a big reason they might try and match the Amazon offer, believed to be worth $1.8 billion per year, whereas the NBC package is believed to be priced at $2.5 billion. WBD is reportedly paying $1.2 billion per year currently.
If and when those packages are signed, that is when the matching clause for WBD will come in to play, so they have not yet been forced to make a decision. Sherman reports they would have five days to match an offer according to someone familiar with the language of the deal.
Sherman says it is still possible WBD does not try and match either offer and brings up the possibility of the league carving out a fourth packages, however, it is unknown if the league would be able to consider such an idea based on having already created a third package.
WBD has the Max platform to use as a streaming service, but Sherman notes that service plans to tier its sports programming, something the NBA would not like compared to Prime Video’s plan of continuing their current price structure.
One other note from Sherman’s report says Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has told others he believes NBCUniversal is overpaying for the NBA based on their research.
