Data, dollars and dunks: why NBC, Amazon and ESPN paid $76bn for NBA rights

Several things stand out. Firstly, the NBA’s new partners have notably strong streaming platforms, while still maintaining ties to network television (ABC/ESPN and NBC) and an over-the-air presence.

“Our new global media agreements with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon will maximize the reach and accessibility of NBA games for fans in the United States and around the world,” the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, said in a statement.

This reach, it would seem, does not include veteran partner of four decades, the Warner Bros Discovery-owned TNT Sports. The NBA rebuffed their offer in favor of Amazon’s Prime Video, making uncertain the future of TNT’s popular Inside the NBA show, featuring Charles Barkley and Ernie Johnson.

The NBA’s rejection of WBD’s offer came after the media giant, home to platforms such as HBO and CNN, opted to match Amazon’s offer on Monday, believing the NBA was unable, contractually, to walk away once they did so.

“We think they have grossly misinterpreted our contractual rights with respect to the 2025-26 season and beyond,” the WBD statement read. “And we will take appropriate action.” How this plays out in a potential legal battle, remains to be seen.

Until recently, sports have largely remained the bulwark of traditional, linear television. But with the media landscape changing at lightning-speed (Insider Intelligence predicts that by the end of 2027, the number of non-streaming subscribers will be less than 35% of the US consumer population), it’s now effectively about who can deliver the greatest access to streaming.

ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro seemingly confirmed this in a statement made shortly after the deals were finalized, saying, “As the media landscape continues to evolve, this forward-thinking agreement represents a significant and bold step in our mission to serve sports fans, anytime, anywhere, including opportunities to successfully navigate the global digital transition.”

For anyone watching closely, the NBA’s decision will not come as a surprise. In several press conferences, Silver made clear the NBA’s commitment to a growing global fanbase, noting the league’s influx of international players – the last six NBA MVPs are from overseas, including reigning NBA MVP Nikola Jokić – and the complicated nature of trying to anticipate how viewership will evolve in the next 11 years.

“We’re all moving into watching premium programming on streaming services,” he said. "[Streaming] really gives the fan enormous additional choice that you don’t have through traditional television.”

But even before WBD’s last minute parry – offering to match Amazon’s $1.8bn just hours before their matching rights window closed – and eventual loss, this deal was turning heads.

Despite unspectacular ratings in recent years (the 2023-24 regular season was up 1% on the previous year) and a past season that Silver admitted some claimed was “boring,” the NBA will nearly treble its income, garnering almost $7bn annually from the deal.

This all follows the protracted will-they-won’t-they last spring, when WBD allowed their exclusive negotiating window with the to NBA close. As incumbents, they were contractually permitted to match any deal put on the table by other challengers.

Matching rights, historically, have been present in just about every broadcast deal, as they incentivize broadcasters to make the enormous investments required to promote and distribute large franchises such as major sports leagues.

“This is not just content that they’ve now purchased the right to telecast for a given number of years,” said Jodi Balsam, professor of clinical law at Brooklyn Law School and a 20-year practicing antitrust lawyer in the sports and entertainment industry.

“This is an entertainment product that they contribute to in so many ways, in terms of the studio teams, and the game day announcers, and the graphics – all the promotions.”

Matching rights protect broadcasters from having the ecosystems they’ve built from being scooped out from under them at the end of every contract. Not any longer in the NBA: matching rights are conspicuously absent from the 2025 deal, setting a potential precedent for the NBA and other leagues for future negotiations.

Balsam said it’s likely the NBA is conceiving of their relationship with media partners differently in this new landscape. “The type of investment that they needed/expected/demanded in the past is maybe no longer necessary, or can be incentivized without a matching rights provision,” she said.

The deal also represents a shrewd and symbiotic business move for Amazon, with streaming platforms increasingly looking to live sports to bolster their subscriber-base – viewers will often sign up to a streaming service to watch a big game and then forget to unsubscribe.

Netflix recently scored prized rights to stream a new package of NFL Christmas Day games and is expected to put on the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing card later this year, which could end up being the most-watched boxing event in modern history.

YouTube now covers the NFL’s valuable Sunday Ticket games. Apple TV exclusively streams MLS. Amazon already has deals with the NFL and WNBA. The writing, it seems, is on the wall, and the NBA knows it.

But bringing streaming platforms into play, several legal experts warned, will add fuel to any growing litigation fires in the form of antitrust. In 1961, Congress passed legislation that effectively exempts the four major sports leagues (NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL) from ordinary antitrust suits when negotiating these deals, allowing them to pool member clubs and television rights, selling them in a package. Crucially, this only applied to the free over-the-air broadcasts of the day.

“As a growing number of sports leagues, including the NBA, consider selling these rights collectively, not to syndicated sports stations, but to cable stations, and now [streaming] stations, a very strong argument is being made that this behavior is not specially exempt from antitrust law, and deals might in theory be subject to antitrust scrutiny,” said Marc Edelman, professor of law at Baruch College, Zicklin School of Business.

This is at the crux of the recently concluded NFL Sunday Ticket lawsuit that resulted in the NFL being ordered to pay almost $5bn in damages for collaborating with DirecTV to artificially jack-up prices and restrict competition.

“If every league isn’t scared following the NFL Sunday Ticket litigation, they should be,” said Helen Drew, a professor of practice in sports law at the University at Buffalo.

“Any time you have a situation in which rights are confined to an exclusive provider or combination of providers, particularly over the long term, that’s going to raise the specter of antitrust liability.”

But this is a risk the NBA seems willing to take. The NBA is the second-most watched league in the US after the NFL, and the new rights holders will clearly be banking on sustained growth as they aim to cement their reputation as the home of all things basketball.

Besides, ratings aren’t everything. One key element of the deal is the access to data. Amazon can scrape details on viewers in a way that traditional broadcasters are unable to match.

For example, the traditional TV networks could get a rough idea of who was watching from where: for example, 500,000 people watched a game in New York City. Amazon offers much more. The company’s surveillance – from game broadcasts to Kindles to Ring Doorbells – can create a complete picture of a person. For example, 21-year-olds in New York watch 23 minutes of games featuring Stephen Curry and are more likely to buy Nike than Adidas.

The NBA can then sell that data to other partners or use it to deliver targeted ads. It replicates the model pursued by the NFL, who moved its Sunday Ticket package from DirectTV to YouTube TV last year, allowing the league to collect more accurate intel on viewers from Google.

Amazon will offer the NBA a similar service, and that could form the backbone of any legal argument from the league that WBD’s offer was not a ‘true’ match. WBD can pay the same amount in dollars terms but is unable to offer the data that Amazon can.

The NBA’s new media partner will also gain access to the increasingly popular WNBA. In the new deal, more than $200m a year will be allocated to the women’s league, representing a hike from 1% of the NBA’s budget to 3%.

The WNBA can also expect to gain additional income from local television coverage rights. While comparatively paltry to the stratospheric sums garnered by the NBA, the amount is gamechanging: while Caitlin Clark, the most prominent rookie in the league, will earn $338,000 in salary over the next four years, the most recent NBA rookie of the year, Victor Wembanyama, will earn $55m from his first contract. A new deal should help to boost WNBA players’ wages, although those in the NBA will go up too.

In 2020 when the WNBA finalized their collective bargaining agreement, negotiations were made based on predictions that women’s basketball would be doubling its television revenues.

“The $200m [a year] represents not a 100% increase, but a 500% increase over what their television revenues were valued in the last collective bargaining agreement,” Balsam said.

But before the deal was signed, some saw the burgeoning growth of the WNBA, with superstar rookies Clark and Angel Reese accelerating a growing fanbase, as worthy of a higher payout.

“Neither the NBA nor the WNBA can deny that in the last few years, we have seen unprecedented growth across all metrics, the players continue to demonstrate their commitment to building the brand, and that the fans keep showing up. There is no excuse to undervalue the WNBA again,” said WNBPA executive director Terri Jackson in a statement to the Washington Post.

The question in all of this is who, in all this immense expenditure, are the losers? NBC, which held NBA rights during the boom years of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, will finally get back in the game after 22 years, toggling between its broadcast and streaming-only platform, Peacock.

But with NBCUniversal now shelling out $2.6bn a year for basketball, $2bn a year for NFL coverage, $7.75bn through 2032 on the Olympics not to mention a suite of other sports, something’s got to give. Right now, it’s certainly not the NBA.

“[Basketball] brings in a broad, diverse, and youthful audience that is culturally relevant and further expands NBCUniversal’s tremendous reach across broadcast and streaming,” Michael Cavanagh, president of NBC’s parent company, Comcast Corporation said in an earnings call earlier this week.

Silver, somewhat unsurprisingly, agrees the NBA has a lot to offer, and has already indicated that when the dust settles after this final round of media deals, they will be looking towards expansion.

“We’re seeing basketball continue to ascend globally and grow leaps and bounds. And much of our effort and much of what I’m spending my time on continues to be growing the game globally,” said Silver prior to the deal’s completion.

“Philosophically, we set out with certain goals in these negotiations. Part of them were economic, but part of them also led to what are the best ways we can serve our fans going forward.”

Guardian