The NBA Board of Governors voted to ratify the new media rights deal with The Walt Disney Company’s ESPN, NBCUniversal and Amazon’s Prime Video worth a reported $76 billion over 11 years. Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns entities that have broadcast NBA games since 1984, has contractual provisions in its existing deal that grants it the ability to exercise a matching rights provision, the breadth of such remains ambiguous.
While reports have indicated that the company intends to try and match the Amazon deal, the company nor the league has currently announced an outcome in this regard. A spokesperson from TNT confirmed to Alex Sherman of CNBC that it had received the new media rights contracts and is currently reviewing the terms.
John Skipper was the president of ESPN when the company signed its last media rights deal with the NBA that started in the 2016-17 season worth a reported $1.4 billion per year. Under the new media rights deal, the company is expected to retain the NBA Finals on ABC, along with airing a conference final in every season but one. The network will also reportedly air fewer regular season games and add a Friday night national game window after the National Football League season concludes. Whether or not Warner Bros. Discovery is able to match depends on if it can be established that what it is offering equates to the Amazon agreement.
“It’s not a simple, ‘Oh, we’re matching,’” Skipper said on the latest edition of The Sporting Class. “They have to match some set of terms and conditions. I think it’s pretty clear now the NBA would prefer to have the partners they have agreed with.”
Amazon’s Prime Video reaches more than 200 million consumers per month, a platform that can provide the NBA with additional global exposure while also introducing a streaming-only functionality to its media rights plan. Skipper believes it is evident that the league wants the international delivery actualized through Amazon, along with a partnership with a technology company focused on innovation.
“I don’t think they anticipated the assertion that the matching right could cover the digital because they specifically want a digital partner,” Skipper said, “and I think that’s good business and a smart choice.”
Warner Bros. Discovery currently holds a $39 billion debt load and has lost two-thirds of its value since forming out of a merger in 2022. With a lowered market capitalization and diminished stock prices, co-host David Samson surmised that the question being asked is if it would make economic sense to match the deal. Although there has been concern about the future of the NBA on TNT broadcast property and the award-winning studio show Inside the NBA from both fans and network talent, reports have suggested that the NBA has moved on from the company.
“‘Do you want to be the one who lost the NBA?,’” Samson conveyed. “I’d rather be the one who lost the NBA than be the one who put my company in financially further dire straits and cause my company stock price to be relentlessly lower and lower, ‘but I kept Inside the NBA?’ That’s not a trade that I would make.”
Samson discerns that Amazon is trying to essentially own a night, evidenced by its Thursday Night Football package of NFL games and agreement to broadcast NBA games on its platform, including on Thursday nights after the NFL season finishes, according to Andrew Marchand of The Athletic. If the media rights deal is closed as reported, the league would have a game on a national platform for seven nights per week upon the conclusion of the NFL schedule, something that has never happened before.
“It still signals that sports rights are the most valuable content in the universe, and it works for everybody,” Skipper said of the NBA media rights agreements. “It works for the traditional broadcaster, NBC. It works for the pay television behemoth, ESPN, which is moving to some pay TV/digital hybrid. And it works for the technology company that wants to get into the sports business.”
In response, Samson presumably cited the Los Angeles Dodgers local television negotiations and the decision from FOX Sports to walk away. The team ended up signing a 25-year, $8.35 billion contract with Time Warner Cable, a company that was folded into Charter Communications in 2016. Spectrum SportsNet LA, the regional sports network that televises Dodgers games, is jointly owned by Guggenheim Partners and Charter Communications. As it pertains to the NBA media rights deal, Samson conjectured that the reported $2.5 billion per year NBC is paying to bring the league back to its network for the first time since 2002 represents a premium.
“[It is] the equivalent of a city needing to pay more money to get a team back after they don’t build a stadium for an existing team and that team leaves. You always pay more,” Samson said. “It’s like paying more to get a new customer than to keep an existing customer. It’s a very simple rule of business, and what NBC is doing – they’re paying a hell of a lot to get back in the NBA game – and so I totally understand why Warner [Bros. Discovery] may not want to pay that amount of money, and from the NBA’s perspective, as long as there’s more bidders and packages, the chart goes up.”
