NBA Agrees to Massive Rights Deals With Disney, Comcast and Amazon

NBA Agrees to Massive Rights Deals With Disney, Comcast and Amazon - The New York Times

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N.B.A. Board Backs TV Rights Deals, but Steps Remain

The agreements, set to begin after next season, could potentially pay the league about $76 billion over 11 years.

The National Basketball Association’s Board of Governors has approved a set of agreements for the rights to show the league’s games, Commissioner Adam Silver said on Tuesday, moving one step closer to completing deals that would reshape how the sport is watched over the next decade.

Mr. Silver declined to discuss any financial details or even the companies involved, though there have been reports for months that Disney, Comcast and Amazon were close to deals with the league. TNT, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, has shown N.B.A. games since the 1980s, but its prominent on-air personalities like Charles Barkley talked during the playoffs about how they worried that the network would lose the rights after next season, the last covered by the current nine-year TV deal.

The companies are expected to pay the N.B.A. a total of about $76 billion over 11 years. On average, ESPN would pay the N.B.A. about $2.6 billion annually, NBC around $2.5 billion and Amazon roughly $1.8 billion, according to three people familiar with the agreements, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the financial details.

The Board of Governors voted to approve the deals at its yearly meeting in Las Vegas. The N.B.A. must now present the deals to Warner Bros. Discovery, and once that happens, the company will have five days to match one of them to remain in the mix.

“We did approve this stage of those media proposals, but as you all know there are other rights that need to be worked through with existing partners,” Mr. Silver said.

Warner Bros. Discovery was expected to try to match Amazon’s offer, according to two people familiar with the company’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the negotiations.

Warner Bros. Discovery declined to comment.

Games broadcast by Warner Bros. Discovery under its existing deal would be split between Comcast and Amazon. The rest would go to Disney, which currently shows league games on ESPN and ABC.

Whether Warner Bros. Discovery has the ability to match Amazon’s offer could be a tension point since Amazon would show games exclusively on its Prime streaming platform and Warner Bros. Discovery broadcasts most of its games on TNT, though it simulcasts those games on its streaming platform, Max.

When completed, the new deals, which start with the 2025-26 season, would be more than two and a half times the average annual value of the N.B.A.’s current rights agreements.

Streaming was a major reason the numbers rose so high. The N.B.A. historically sold two packages of games, 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 N.B.A. is diving in fully.

Warner Bros. Discovery had an exclusive window in which to negotiate with the league, but it balked at the N.B.A.’s insistence on reducing its package of games. 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 N.B.A.,” David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, said at an investor conference in 2022. That raised questions within the league’s offices about the company’s commitment.

When the N.B.A. started planning for its rights negotiations years ago, such lucrative new agreements seemed unlikely. Media companies had already shelled out big money for N.F.L. rights, a few million households per year were dropping cable packages and Wall Street was demanding that streaming services stop focusing on endless growth and instead show profitability.

But even with many entertainment companies looking to cut costs and get spending under control, the opportunity to secure the long-term rights to televise N.B.A. games proved attractive.

Nicole Sperling contributed reporting.

Tania Ganguli writes about money, power and influence in sports and how it impacts the broader culture. More about Tania Ganguli

Kevin Draper writes about money, power and influence in sports, focusing on a range of topics, including workplace harassment and discrimination, sexual misconduct and doping. He can be reached at kevin.draper@nytimes.com or kevin.draper@protonmail.com. More about Kevin Draper
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