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The Future. The NBA and WNBA finalized their TV deals for the next 11 years, and as expected, they’re rich. With sports rights seen as one of the few must-have pieces of programming needed to ensure that networks and streamers stay culturally relevant, the competition was fierce… which shows how including streaming distribution, Hollywood crossovers, and even theme-park access could forever be the special sauce to winning rights.
Star players
Pro basketball just scored some major paydays for its media rights.
- The NBA is getting $76 billion from Disney (80 regular-season games, plenty of playoff matches, the NBA Finals), NBC (100 regular-season games, the All-Star Game, USA Basketball games), and Amazon (66 regular-season games, a Black Friday game).
- The deals include unique benefits like a significant streaming presence on each company’s platform, the ability to make “custom content” with Marvel Studios, and a presence at Walt Disney World.
- The WNBA also made deals with Disney, NBC, and Amazon, consolidating its games to three companies from five (Disney, Amazon, CBS, Scripps’ ION network, and NBA TV were the previous rights holders).
- The deals are valued at a total of $2.2 billion — a fraction of the NBA ones but three times more than the current media-rights deals, thanks to the league’s exploding popularity.
The only company not happy about these deals is Warner Bros. Discovery. TNT has been a long-time home of the NBA and tried to match Amazon’s bid for rights. The NBA says the bid didn’t match, so it went with the tech giant. WBD now plans to sue.
It looks like the competition isn’t over yet.
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