Before the Olympic cauldron gets lit in Paris on July 26, the National Basketball Association is expected to officially announce its 11-year, $76bn (€70bn) domestic media rights agreement with incumbent Walt Disney and newcomers NBC and Amazon Prime Video from 2025-26.
At $6.9bn per year, it represents a staggering increase on the $2.6bn annual fee the NBA has garnered in the nine-year deal with Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT Sport, which ends after the 2024-25 season.
The headline news is that ESPN and its ABC national network will keep the league’s top package, including the NBA Finals exclusively, which have been on ABC since 2003, and one of the conference finals series, plus a number of regular season games. It will pay around $2.6bn per year for the privilege, up from $1.4bn per year at present.
The other conference final will alternate each year between NBC and Prime Video. NBC would show games on Sunday night after the NFL season has ended, as well as on Tuesdays throughout the regular season and stream a Monday night package on Peacock. For that, it is set to pay a considerable $2.5bn.
For $1.8bn per year, Prime Video will have games on Thursday (after its NFL season coverage finishes), Friday and Saturday nights.
It’s important to note that TNT Sports, as an incumbent, can match one of the offers and it is reportedly intent on doing so. The NBA’s board of governors has approved the Disney-NBC-Amazon bids, with the contracts now before WBD, which has until close of play on Monday July 22 to decide whether to make a bid.
Aside from the huge financials on offer, SportBusiness delves into what this landmark rights deal means for stakeholders across the US sports industry.
1. What now for WBD?
It may of course match one of the bids made to the NBA, most likely Amazon’s package, but WBD has arguably been hedging against a ‘hoops’ loss over the last few months with a handful of domestic rights deals.
It has splashed out an eye-watering $650m to become the exclusive home of the French Open in the US from 2025 to 2034, succeeding NBC.
It’s also getting into Nascar from 2025 and is back in college football for the first time since 2006, having signed a multi-year agreement with Mountain West Conference. It also recently agreed a college basketball deal with the Big East in a six-year deal with Fox and NBC.
These additions to a live sports portfolio that already comprises US Soccer, MLB and NHL are vital, but the NBA loss will be a significant blow, as TNT boasts one of the highest affiliate fees in the US cable market, around $3 per subscriber per month.
NFL aside, nothing is more valuable than the NBA.
Will cable operators baulk at paying such a price in future carriage talks – already a tense negotiation process – in an NBA-less TNT world?
And what then of WBD’s stake and role in Venu Sports, the new streaming service it is launching later this year with ESPN and Fox?
2. Is the NFL undervalued?
Raking in over $10bn per year, it seems a strange question to ask, but the NFL has been the top dog in the North American sports market for a long time and by a long distance. And now the NBA is eating into some of that pie.
The NFL’s $110bn primary broadcast deal split among Amazon, CBS, ESPN, Fox and NBC runs 2023 to 2033, while Netflix is paying around $400m for three years’ worth of exclusive Christmas Day games and YouTube pays the league $2bn per season for Sunday Ticket.
There are still a few years until the league begins negotiating new broadcast deals, but news of the NBA’s $76bn deal won’t stop the 32 team owners anticipating another bumper pay day.
After all, the NFL remains the top attraction because of its ratings and advertising prowess. More Americans watched NFL games on TV in 2023 than any other programming, accounting for 93 of the 100 highest rated shows. And its dominance is growing: in 2022, the NFL accounted for 82 of the top 100 telecasts. It was 75 in 2021 and 72 in 2020.
Earlier this month, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was asked by CNBC whether, in light of the NBA’s impending media contracts, his league was now undervalued.
He said: “A lot of people in the NFL think they’re underpaid. But I think we have great relationships with our networks and a lot of our media is not about the dollars as much as it is how do we reach more fans? That’s the primary objective for us. Obviously, we want to be paid fairly but for us, it’s about reaching fans and being on a free platform like we are allows our fans to see that and I think that’s what’s led to the great popularity of the league but obviously the great ratings.
“You see the changes and fans are moving off of paid television platforms. So we want to be where the fans are. Netflix has close to 300 million subscribers on a global basis, which was really attractive for us in being able to reach that global fan.”
With the NFL on record as wanting to go where the fans are, how much more would Amazon and Netflix be willing to pay to eat into some of the packages currently sold to network television?
Of the three other major leagues in North America, MLB generates $12bn over seven years to 2028 from ESPN, Fox and TNT. Apple has a separate seven-year deal, running through 2029 and worth close to $600m in total, while Roku’s Sunday afternoon games are worth $10m per season.
The NHL brings in around $635m per year in deals with ESPN ($410m) and TNT ($225m) for 2021-22 to 2027-28, while Major League Soccer gets $250m per year, or $2.5bn over the course of its 10-year exclusive global streaming rights deal with Apple that runs to 2032.
3. What’s NBC’s Olympics appetite now?
This is a mammoth outlay from NBC’s parent Comcast – it’s annual impending NBA bill is roughly the same as the value of the league’s entire domestic rights in the current cycle.
In the face of the aggressive streaming giants, legacy media companies are under pressure to deal with rising costs while managing the declining revenues and profits for their traditional TV businesses.
NBC is taking the challenge head on – hoping the NBA’s younger-skewed audience keeps it even more relevant in the changing sports media landscape in the US. It has not shown the NBA since 2002.
The package of Monday night games will also serve to boost Peacock, its streaming platform that has struggled to reach profitability despite steady subscriber growth.
But NBC is synonymous with the Olympic Games – it is the International Olympic Committee’s long-standing rights-holding broadcaster in the US with the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics the first under a new $7.75bn rights contract, which runs to 2032 and encompasses the home 2028 Games in Los Angeles.
But then what? It is a question being asked by senior media figures across the US that SportBusiness has spoken to.
Discussions with the IOC will likely begin around the time of LA28. It’s not NBC’s appetite for the Olympics that is up for debate, more the finances it would be willing to commit, which will ring alarm bells at the IOC headquarters.
The NBA is set to cost NBC $2.5bn per year, the NFL bill a little less at $2bn per annum. That’s a significant outlay, but for that it gets a significant portion of the US sporting calendar.
Something may have to give. Could it be a two-week Olympics, interest in which is seemingly waning in the US.
During the Tokyo 2020 summer Games, which were delayed by 12 months due to the pandemic, NBCUniversal attracted its lowest-ever domestic audience for the event since its coverage began in 1988, an average of 15.5 million primetime TV viewers over its 17-day run in the US. The time difference did not help and resulted in a 42-per-cent decline from the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, which averaged 26.7 million viewers on NBC. However, the London 2012 Games attracted an average of 31.1 million. The Paris 2024 audiences will be eagerly awaited.
4. Amazon and the power of bulk
Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
If you want NBA, you know what you need and where you need to go and that makes Amazon a must-have destination for fans.
Amazon is no longer sitting on the sidelines, picking up bits of rights here and there. In the US, at least, it is a serious competitor when tenders hit the market.
The $1.8bn NBA per year offer exceeds its average $1.1bn annual outlay on NFL rights. Of course, the NFL still dominates its scheduling – the Thursday night NBA action will only kick-in after the NFL regular season ends.
It will also be the main network for the NBA In-Season Tournament, providing it a large bulk of content during the months of November and December.
Indeed, bulk is key word right now for the streaming giants. They are no longer considered the nice-to-have add-on to a media strategy that skews to younger audiences.
While streaming services have attracted customers with high-quality original programming and movies, they recognise live sports is the most efficient way to attract massive audiences and build scale. They’re targeting premium rights, and lots of it, over the course of a longer-period of time.
It’s a strategy seen in the UK with Amazon, which is to end its Premier League coverage after 2024-25, with Champions League rights already in the bag for the new campaign.
Essentially it means Amazon will swap out 20 Premier League matches played (some simultaneously) over two game weeks in December, for 17 first-pick matches every Tuesday throughout the new-look Champions League season.
5. WNBA’s time to shine
What of the WNBA in all of this? The league is enjoying its moment in the sun, with the introduction of a prominent rookie class headlined by No. 1 pick Caitlin Clark making it a ratings and attendance magnet in 2024.
It currently earns around $60m per year in agreements with Amazon, ESPN, CBS and Scripps Sport’s ION to the end of 2025, but that is set to grow more than threefold in the wake of the NBA’s deal to over $200m a year, or $2.2bn over the lifetime of the agreements.
The two leagues negotiated their TV rights together, but the WNBA is taking a bigger cut this time around, 3 per cent, rather than 1 per cent previously.
But its story does not end there, as the WNBA also expects to sell two additional packages of games that could be worth $60m or more per year.
At $260m per year, that puts the annual value of the WNBA’s media rights above those of MLS.
The increase in media rights fees will significantly escalate future salary caps and player salaries, but will also bump up the value of team franchises.
In May, the WNBA announced it is to expand into Canada for the first time in 2026, when Toronto joins as the 14th team, having paid an expansion fee of around $50m.
The WNBA awarded its first expansion franchise since 2008 to the NBA’s Golden State Warriors late last year for $50m, with the team set to begin play in 2025. The league says it will have 16 teams by the 2028 season.