The NBA has signed a new 11 year, $77 billion media rights deal with the Walt Disney Company, NBCUniversal and Amazon, which will see the league’s nationally broadcast games spread across each partner’s various streaming services and channels. This deal is the latest addition to the epidemic of greedy media rights deals between sports leagues and streaming services that make enjoying sports harder than ever for fans.
NBA fans are primarily concerned that they will now need subscriptions to three streaming services in order to watch the league’s nationally televised games. In each regular season for the lifetime of the deal, Disney will broadcast 80 games across ABC and ESPN, NBCUniversal will broadcast 100 games on NBC and Peacock, and Amazon will broadcast 66 games on Prime Video.
The idea behind this arrangement, according to the NBA, is to provide fans across the country with more premier matchups. At a glance, a total of 246 nationally televised games is much better than the 172 fans got last year, but due to the fact that these games are split across different broadcast partners, few fans are actually going to be able to watch all of these games.
As for when the games would be shown, a weekly broadcast schedule dedicates each day of the week to one of the deal’s partners. This means a subscriber to one of the three platforms that offer nationally televised games will still not be able to get a game every night they turn on their TV. It also means if a fan is fortunate enough to have their favorite team play a nationally televised game, but the game happens to be on a different service, they are still out of luck. For fans of a popular or successful team like the Los Angeles Lakers, who are set to play a league-high 34 nationally broadcast games across each platform, this is not that serious of an issue. However, this is a huge problem for fans of a team like the Utah Jazz, who are set to play just two nationally televised games all season, with one on Peacock and one on NBC. If a fan wants to watch a nationally broadcast Jazz game, but does not pay for NBCUniversal channels, they are once again out of luck. Across the league, viewership and enjoyment will drop simply because fans cannot watch the nationally televised games that are supposed to be the most entertaining.
Furthermore, it is not just in the regular season where the greedy nature of this deal comes at the expense of the fans. Disney will keep the exclusive right to the NBA Finals on ABC, which they have held for over two decades. However, the rest of the playoffs are now being split up amongst the deal’s partners too, with the most notable change coming in the distribution of the NBA Conference Finals. From this season forward, Disney and its channels will have the rights to one conference finals series, while Amazon and NBCUniversal will alternate the rights to the other. This change makes watching some of the most competitive and consequential series of the NBA not only difficult, but extremely confusing as well.
While this new deal in particular makes nationally televised games and the playoffs far less accessible, the difficulty fans face when trying to watch the NBA does not end there. Casual fans who only care about watching their home team will still have to pay subscriptions to regional streaming services. For example, if a Hawks fan who lives in Atlanta wants to watch their team play in the regular season, they would have to pay $19.99 a month for a subscription to the Fanduel Sports Network. This greedy practice by the NBA adds yet another layer to the expensive and convoluted issue of enjoying basketball, as casual fans are not able to support their local teams and experience NBA games as a whole without paying large sums of money to multiple parties.
Additionally, one might think they can avoid these roadblocks by paying for the NBA’s League Pass, which promises the ability to stream games at the cost of $109.99 a season for the lowest subscription tier. However, the games accessible on League Pass are only out-of-market games, due to the fact that regional streaming services will always retain the exclusive right to show in-market-games. Essentially, League Pass provides yet another subscription service that puts more of the league’s games behind a paywall, rather than a way for fans to get more basketball at a better price. It is disguised as an all-inclusive subscription for the true fan, and while it can provide more basketball, it really just puts a high price on another section of content that fans will have to pay to see.
As a whole, the NBA’s management of the rights to their games makes it extremely difficult for fans to follow the league and its storylines. For a league so obsessed with improving its ratings, they seemingly make it as hard as possible for their fans to actually consume their product. Not only do fans have to pay exceedingly large amounts of money, but the division of games by market and by ownership of TV rights leads to some fans not even knowing where to go to watch basketball games. For the NBA and its partners, their billion-dollar deals are increasingly coming before what they should be prioritizing the most: delivering games to fans.
