N.B.A. Announces Lucrative Rights Deals With Disney, Comcast and Amazon
N.B.A. Announces Lucrative Rights Deals With Disney, Comcast and Amazon - The New York Times
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N.B.A. Announces Lucrative Rights Deals With Disney, Comcast and Amazon
The league rejected a bid by Warner Bros. Discovery to match Amazon’s offer.
The National Basketball Association announced new rights agreements with Disney, Comcast and Amazon on Wednesday in which the companies will collectively pay $77 billion over 11 years, substantially increasing the league’s annual revenue and reflecting 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 to match Amazon’s offer.
“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. All three partners have also committed substantial resources to promote the league and enhance the fan experience.”
The new deals, which include both N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. games, will take effect with the 2025-26 season and are more than two and a half times the average annual value of the league’s current rights agreements.
Left on the outside is Warner Bros. Discovery. That means the league will end its longstanding relationship with TNT, which is owned by the company and has broadcast N.B.A. games since the 1980s. The company had an exclusive window in which to negotiate with the league, but it balked at receiving a different package of games from the one it has now. It said on Monday that it had made a matching offer for one of the packages.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Tania Ganguli writes about money, power and influence in sports and how it impacts the broader culture. More about Tania Ganguli
N.B.A.
Inside the Media Industry
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Warner Bros. Discovery: The company
said it had matched a rival offer from Amazon to air N.B.A. games, a move aimed at allowing it to keep the broadcast rights it has held for decades.
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Wall Street Journal: A reporter for the newspaper in Hong Kong said that she had been
fired over her role as the leader of a journalists’ trade union.
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CNN: The network’s leader
announced 100 job cuts as well as a digital strategy that would include a new subscription-only offering by the end of the year.
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CBS News: Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, the CBS News president, announced that she would
step down from her role and would move into a senior adviser role through the presidential election.
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Paramount: Paramount and Skydance said they had
reached an agreement to merge. The deal could make David Ellison, the tech scion behind Skydance, one of the most powerful people in Hollywood.
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