What the NBA's new TV deal means for viewership and national, local markets
This has been a spring of change for the NBA. While the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers vie for a title in the NBA Finals, the playoffs have also been a last stand of sorts for some of the league's broadcast partners.
The Eastern Conference finals were the last time the NBA will be on TNT for the considerable future after a four-decade run. While Inside the NBA is moving to ESPN next season, it may never be the same. But there were also other small goodbyes. This postseason was the last time that local regional sports networks were able to broadcast the first round of the playoffs; next season, they will all be nationally televised.
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This paradigm shift is a result of the media rights deals the NBA signed last summer, when it agreed to 11-year contracts with Disney, Amazon and NBC, worth a total of $75 billion. Next year, the NBA will have two new viewing homes, a larger presence on broadcast television and the option to stream any nationally televised game. It will represent a profound adjustment in how fans can watch games.
But at least those changes have already been prescribed and accounted for. The league's future is far murkier when it comes to games broadcast in local markets, which make up the vast majority of the schedule and how most fans watch their favorite team. The long-term local broadcast situation for many NBA teams remains in flux heading into this summer, and the league is also wrestling with what to do after conducting a season-long study into the local RSN ecosystem. The situation is so unpredictable that commissioner Adam Silver said the NBA is trying to get a better understanding of it before it decides whether to expand.
'We do need to figure out something there,' Silver said last week. 'I mean, for the league, we have several of our team regional networks that have actually shut down. Others have recently come out of bankruptcy. Others seem to be teetering. We're going through a transition in media.'
The league spent the past year trying to get a handle on its present and future as cord-cutting has led customers to cancel cable (or never sign up) in droves, which puts acute pressure on RSNs and the pro sports franchises that rely on them for rights fees. Bill Koenig, the NBA's president of global content and media distribution, talked to each team and the RSNs and broadcast station groups, as well as streaming services, before presenting his findings at the league's board of governors meeting in March. It gave the NBA more insight into their predicament, but no easy answers.
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Take the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers, the two NBA Finals teams. Their games are on Main Street Sports Group — née Diamond Sports — RSNs. While Main Street exited bankruptcy last fall, there is still uncertainty.
Thirteen NBA teams currently have contracts with Main Street Sports. That number has been culled over the last few years, but will at least be stable for next season. Five teams — the Atlanta Hawks, Cleveland Cavaliers, Miami Heat, Minnesota Timberwolves and Milwaukee Bucks — chose this spring to stay on FanDuel Sports Network for the next two years instead of opting out of their contracts, according to sources briefed on the deals. One team executive said the difficulty of navigating the broadcast landscape outside of the RSN model has made it 'worse than cable,' as they pointed out why those 13 teams have clung to their deals. While the new national media deals will pay NBA teams about $140 million each when it begins next season, and escalate up to about $290 million in the final year of the contracts, according to industry sources, local TV rights fees are still important sources of revenue for franchises, especially as teams that left cable see theirs drop and those still with Main Street Sports have had theirs clipped.
But if they had left, they would have joined the growing list of franchises that have chosen to get out of the cable RSN business that has dominated local broadcasts for the last few decades. The Utah Jazz, Phoenix Suns, Dallas Mavericks, Portland Trail Blazers and New Orleans Pelicans left their RSNs for a combination of over-the-air networks and streaming (supported by the NBA on the back end).
Still, even franchises with relatively stable local media deals must still weather turbulence. The Knicks just took a 28 percent cut on their local media rights fees from MSG Networks — despite both being run by James Dolan — as the RSN teetered on the brink of bankruptcy while re-negotiating more than $800 million in debt that had come due. The Chicago Bulls lingered in purgatory this season as Chicago Sports Network, their new co-owned RSN, struggled to get distribution. It did not reach a deal to be on Comcast until late last week. The former Diamond Sports RSNs were off Comcast for three months last summer during a contract impasse last summer; the current deal between Main Street Sports Group and Comcast runs through October, according to an industry source, but Comcast has an option to pick up another year.
Despite all that, Silver and others around the NBA say that there is immense interest in its local broadcasts. The Washington Wizards have leaned into that premise in recent years. Monumental Sports, which owns the franchise and the Mystics and Capitals, bought its local RSN — NBC Washington — three years ago. Zach Leonsis, Monumental's president of media & new enterprises and son of Ted Leonsis, said he felt the ownership group had to step in as it saw the broadcasts deteriorate during the pandemic and as it became more difficult to distribute the games. Monumental already owned a third of the RSN, so it got the rest and acquired its media rights back.
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'The team started to feel like eliminating a middleman and taking advantage of some of our own capabilities might be the best, the best path forward,' Leonsis said. 'In our case, there was a defensive mindset in not wanting to have our regional sports network be acquired by another company, wanting to protect the integrity of our content, wanting to push the envelope a little bit more on going direct to consumer and developing additional channels for distribution.
'In our view, our network was a small asset, a tail on Godzilla of a larger Fortune 500 company, but for us a core asset, still the number one way that we reach our fans. Today, even. Nearly three million cable subscribers. And we want that product to be a very, very good one, and we didn't want it to end up in somebody else's hands that we didn't sign up to be with. In terms of playing offense, we viewed it as an opportunity to invest back into our rights, and that's really what we acquire.'
Leonsis said Monumental Sports Network is in a good place. They have paid off all the debt on their network. Their digital viewership has more than doubled from year to year.
Leonsis believes that Monumental is proof that there is still plenty of interest in watching sports locally, but the question is how teams can monetize their rights and where they can broadcast their games. Wizards, Capitals and Mystics games are available on cable and through streaming, and Monumental runs it all. That has allowed them to forge different parts of their business together. When they acquired their RSN, Monumental found that the longest advertising deal the network had was a one-year deal and the largest deal was for $400,000. After merging the sales team for the teams and network together, they now have 15 sponsorship contracts of three-plus seasons and 15 deals worth more than $400,000.
That's a decision other teams may soon need to make for themselves. Leonsis said that cable will continue to bring in the most money for teams and linear television will bring in the most viewers.
'But you need some scale,' he said. 'It's harder to launch a single team RSN these days. You want multiple teams. We have the advantage of owning multiple teams ourselves. We'd like to grow in that aspect as well. That's why I think you are seeing some teams pursue virtual mergers, if you will, like it did in Chicago, they're trying to stand up an RSN on its own. It is hard to stand up distribution from scratch that way, sort of in this environment. So it really varies team to team, market to market.'
The NBA has been searching for answers and it may need to step in at some point. The league has discussed a national streaming service for its local broadcasts. While it isn't going to commander teams' local rights, a source called it 'inevitable.' Eventually, the NBA might need to produce games too — which some teams already do.
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Next season is likely to be a transition year. Last season, about half of locally broadcast games were available for streaming in-market. Next season, every NBA team but the Houston Rockets could be, if the league reaches a deal with respective RSNs for the digital rights for those other 29 teams as intends to do (Houston is working on it as well, but it is uncertain if the team will be able to reach a deal).
FanDuel Sports Network, owned by Main Street Sports, owns the digital rights for 13 NBA teams and said that it plans to hit one million streaming subscribers by the end of 2025. It is opening to adding more teams or bringing teams it used to have the rights for, according to one source briefed on the matter. The league has a multi-year deal with Main Street Sports Group for those digital rights that will remain in place as long as Main Street Sports meets certain conditions, including avoiding bankruptcy.
In some way, it is already rolling out a smaller version of a local League Pass through a deal with Amazon Prime Video, where fans can buy the right to stream games from those 13 teams in their market. But Amazon is effectively a reseller in that scenario, and there is no guarantee NBA games will be available through that option next season because the league only agreed to a one-year deal with Main Street Sports.
The NBA has considered launching a local League Pass, but that likely wouldn't be until the 2026-27 season at the earliest. It has spoken to Amazon, Apple, YouTube, DAZN, Disney, and Peacock about that idea, and has also considered doing that itself through the NBA App.
The NBA has been looking at how to increase distribution and reach for its games. Koenig mentioned it during a hearing in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation last month.
'If you go to the WNBA app, you will be able to click right on the game and go directly there,' he said. 'It's on a digital platform. You'll be able to access the games. And we're going to even do that beyond just the NBA and WNBA apps. We're going to do that through a number of other partner and team relationships, you might be able when you order food to watch a game from that food delivery app directly to a game telecast.'
The future of local NBA broadcasts is uncertain, but, as the team executive pointed out, it will be much different in a year or two.
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Jessie D. Garrabrandt / Getty, Nic Antaya/ Getty, Bloomberg / Getty)
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