The competitive, high-stakes bidding war is just beginning over who will televise National Basketball Association (NBA) games 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…
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.
MacDailyNews Note: Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Fox, and Netflix are all expected to be involved in bidding. Of Apple, Smith writes:
Pros: Apple has been expanding its ambitions in sports, having acquired rights to Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball. It can reach hundreds of millions of people globally who own its devices. It has a relationship with the league via a music deal. The NBA has also structured its media contracts so its local, national and international rights deals are set to expire at the same time. That may be especially attractive to Apple, which showed in its MLS deal a preference for acquiring the global media rights to a sports property. Apple executive Eddy Cue is a fan of the Golden State Warriors and, like commissioner Silver, went to Duke University.
Cons: How committed Apple is to live sports remains unclear, and it’s difficult to tell whether the investment is paying off because the company does not reveal how many people watch its soccer and baseball broadcasts.
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