TNT, which Warner Bros. Discovery owns, has broadcast N.B.A. games since the 1980s.
By TANIA GANGULI, KEVIN DRAMER AND NICOLE SPERLING
The National Basketball Association announced new rights agreements with Disney, Comcast and Amazon on Wednesday after rejecting a rival bid by Warner Bros. Discovery that would have kept games on its TNT network, which has broadcast the NBA since the 1980s.
The companies will collectively pay more than $76 billion over 11 years, according to four people familiar with the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the financial details. That will substantially increase the league’s annual revenue and reflects the continued importance of live sports programming, even as streaming has reconfigured the entertainment industry.
In making the announcement, the league said it had rejected Warner Bros. Discovery’s bid this week to match Amazon’s offer for its share of the package.
“Throughout these negotiations, our primary objective has been to maximize the reach and accessibility of our games for our fans,” the league said in a statement. “Our new arrangement with Amazon supports this goal by complementing the broadcast, cable and streaming packages that are already part of our new Disney and NBCUniversal arrangements.” (NBCUniversal is owned by Comcast.)
“All three partners have also committed substantial resources to promote the league and enhance the fan experience,” the statement added.
The new deals, which include NBA and some WNBA games, will take effect with the 2025-26 season and are more than 2 1/2 times the average annual value of the league’s current rights agreements.
Warner Bros. Discovery, in its own statement, said that it did not believe the NBA could reject its bid and that in doing so the league was “rejecting the many fans who continue to show their unwavering support for our best-in-class coverage.”
“We think they have grossly misinterpreted our contractual rights with respect to the 2025-26 season and beyond, and we will take appropriate action,” the company said.
Streaming was a major reason the financial numbers rose so high for these deals. The NBA has historically sold two packages of games — Disney, which owns ESPN and ABC, and Warner Bros. Discovery hold the rights under the current nine-year deal — but it created a third package this time to entice new bidders, particularly streaming companies.
For years, sports leagues and streaming companies circled each other warily. The leagues did not want to alienate viewers or traditional broadcast partners by moving too many games to streaming services, while those services, committed to providing content to audiences whenever they wanted to watch, were slow to embrace the possibilities of live programming.
But in the past few years, the National Football League and Major League Baseball have grown more comfortable with streaming, and now the NBA is diving in fully.
On average, Disney will pay the NBA $2.62 billion annually, Comcast $2.45 billion and Amazon more than $1.8 billion, according to the four people familiar with the negotiations. The NBA Finals will be shown on ABC, and one conference championship series will be shown on ESPN, while the other will alternate between NBC and Amazon. NBC will have the rights to air All-Star Weekend, while Amazon will be the home of the league’s in-season tournament.
All of Amazon’s games will be shown on its Prime streaming service, while Disney’s games will be shown on ABC, ESPN and its forthcoming flagship streaming service. Comcast will show games on NBC and its Peacock streaming service.
“Our audience tends to be younger than television, so I think our deal will bring a younger audience that may not be subscribing to pay television to the NBA, and then we’ll likely have people coming to Prime Video that hadn’t before,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, said in an interview.
In its recent earnings call, Comcast said Peacock lost 500,000 subscribers in the second quarter, dipping to 33 million just before the Paris Olympics, which NBCUniversal is televising.
As part of the agreements, $200 million will be allotted annually to the WNBA, according to one of the people familiar with the negotiations. Combined with roughly $60 million it is expected to get from other deals, that’s roughly six times what the league currently gets, a sign of the league’s surging popularity thanks in part to interest in rookie stars Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.
“We are extending our position as the primary rights partner for the WNBA and that feels really good,” James Pitaro, chair of ESPN, said. He added that the WNBA Finals would be exclusive on its platforms for five of the 11 seasons, and that it will have exclusive rights to the league’s All-Star Game and draft for the entirety of the deal.
Left on the outside is Warner Bros. Discovery. Because it is a current rights holder, the company had an exclusive negotiating window with the league, but it balked at receiving a different package of games from the one it has now. That added to an already shaky back and forth between the league and the company, which was formed in 2022 after Discovery bought WarnerMedia, whose assets included TNT.
“We don’t have to have the NBA,” David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, said at an investor conference in 2022. That raised questions in the league’s offices about the company’s commitment to the NBA.
At the suggestion of Warner Bros. Discovery — which most likely knew that the NBA was looking for a streaming partner — Amazon’s negotiations began during Warner Bros. Discovery’s exclusive window, according to two people familiar with the discussions, who talked about private details on the condition of anonymity. Warner Bros. Discovery declined to comment about that part of the negotiation.
After Warner Bros. Discovery’s window expired, the NBA quickly moved to secure agreements with Comcast and Amazon. Although Warner Bros. Discovery tried to return to the negotiating table, the league had moved on.
Comments