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It's being reported that NBC is going to buy the rights to air the B package (I'm not entirely sure what this means, except that it's a slice of total coverage) at $2.5 billion, which is roughly 2x what TNT was paying.
What I'm curious about here is that it should be pretty simple to do revenue estimates on owning coverage, and that would be transparent-ish. Do you think NBC is using it as a loss leader and eating some of the amount, or are they pulling a profit (and if so, why isn't TNT bidding to keep it)?
Also, why the package was so low to begin with, given how much it's valued at now?
Anyway, I'd love to talk more about broadcasting rights and get your thoughts on how these bids are made, how games are sliced up, and what your thoughts on the news about NBC are.
Ever since the value of those rights began to significantly increase past the mid-1980s, every time a Network decided to call it quits because of financial discipline and strategic motives, its reentered later on at a much steeper cost. This is because sports TV rights are not only a marquee and prestige, almost white-elephant kind of property. They provide a lot of indirects benefits to you, adding to the basic value you draw from them, in the form of commercials, subscriptions and carriage fees.
The biggest value the NBA can provide to network is the strength and volume of its inventory. When you buy the NBA for the regular season, you ensure you will have, say, 15 to 35 nights in the regular season, with double headers to fill your schedule. The ratings for these game are quite easy to foresee, you know you will get 1.5 to 4 million every time, and of the coveted young demographics. This is a strong draw for NBC, ESPN and such.
NFL is absolutely on a whole another scale ratings-wise and cost per game. Its calendar does not overlap that much the NBA's. Thus the two complement actually quite well each other. MLB is way too regional until october in its viewing habits so you won't have the same ratings baseline. NHL has similar inventory depth than the NBA but its rating celling is way too low and its demographics less favorable. So, the NBA really is in a sweet spot.
Then, there is the value you can add to your OTP platform. For Peacock, to be able to add several dozens of games throughout the season is a massive boon and will drive subscriptions up. Then you hope you can build on that some kind of momentum and reach critical mass in the great streaming struggle that will sooner or later lead to mass consolidation.
But there is maybe even more for Comcast at play in this. Actually to be spending that much is maybe not that much of a lead loss move, and perhaps even financially-sound. Should you gain the NBA, you are bound to increase by a lot the carriage fee you will ask for USA, which is rumored to get some games. But at the same time, you will be able to dictate a significant reduction in carriage fees paid to TNT, as the network won't have the NBA anymore - which is the sole reason why they have been able to demand for a top 3 carriage fee over the past 30 years. So you can end up cashing hundreds of millions in on the one hand and saving hundreds of millions on the other with this move, which decreases the "real" cost of this bid.
To add to this, Comcast/NBCUniversal have been investing a lot in Europe and Africa via Sky Showtime and Showmax. I’d imagine the NBA is the most marketable US sport globally, and it should provide a good boost to the investment they’ve already put into those two regions
I don't think this grants them any international rights. Those are usually the domain of ESPN and now Amazon apparently
I think you’re correct. This article seems to indicate that.
When it comes to Europe basketball is probably tied with hockey, depends a lot on which country. It's a massive market though and basketball is a growing sport over here.
The issue is always time-zones. East Coast games starting 0100-0300 and West Coast 0300-0500 is a massive hurdle and hard to ever overcome. US sports will always have that issue getting into the European market.
The NBA is doing great things though. We are getting so many early weekend games that we can catch, it's increasing every year. You were lucky if you got 1 per season 15 years ago, now we get a couple every single weekend and playoff games. No finals or conf-finals games last year though, I hope that is changed for this year.
NFL or anyother American sports doesn’t mean much to the rest of the world. But NBA is loved all over the world. So you might be right.
As exorbitant as the spending on rights is getting, from the networks' perspective, it is increasingly a good deal. Live events can inherently charge higher ad rates, and production costs are limited to studio shows and live broadcast infrastructure (which aren't nothing). Compare this to spending $1m per episode on an original scripted series that might not last a season or ever gain traction with viewers. Or seeing the network/studio's profit reduced over time because of series profit participation for creative principals that kicks in after 4-5 years.
If you want to see what happens to a network when they lose rights they previously had, look at what happened to the CBS network in the 90s. Without the Sunday NFL viewership getting CBS tv show promos, their primetime lineup went into the toilet. Accordingly, the weak primetime lineup was also a weak lead-in for Letterman (who the network had signed 6 mos before losing the NFL), who then started losing to Jay Leno. CBS' audience suddenly got very old, and their only hits in the 90s were basically Letterman and Everybody Loves Raymond.
It took CBS outbidding NBC in 1998 to get the NFL rights back, plus Survivor and CSI debuting in 2000, for CBS to finally undo the damage done by the original NFL rights loss.
Also, I have to imagine the CBS audience being really old likely became more of an asset as they were much less likely to be lost to cord cutting
CBS losing the NFL initially in 1994 actually helped set-off a whole lot of changes in the American TV landscape. It led to Fox having an affiliation raid of CBS stations in a lot of key NFC markets (outside of NYC, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington) where those stations swapped to Fox.
In Atlanta, Austin (a secondary Cowboys market), Cleveland (an AFC city), Dallas, Detroit, Phoenix, Tampa, Milwaukee (a co-primary market of the Packers), the longtime CBS stations there changed to Fox; in St. Louis and New Orleans, the longtime ABC stations there also swapped to Fox, and NBC stations in Green Bay and Kansas City (another AFC city) also changed their network affiliation to Fox. It should set-off a domino effect where certain station groups starting to align with certain networks, and some stations being acquired by particular networks outright. This also coincided with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which essentially enabled broadcast companies to expand their portfolios by acquiring more and more stations, including being able to own two stations in the same TV market.
This is such a clear and easy to follow explanation. Thank you.
Do you mean OTT? I only know OTP as one time password.
Yeah typo, OTT
If we take into account that the NBA has x5 times as many games in a season compared to the NFL, how do those ratings compare? Does the NFL bring in more revenue overall even though they run a lot fewer ads? I guess pundit talk shows like ESPN/Inside the NBA etc are unaffected by this, they can talk all week even though the game isn't on so and people might still tune in?
NFL
In a typical NFL season, each of the 32 teams plays 16 regular-season games.
During the playoffs, there are a total of 11 games:
Wild Card round: 6 games
Divisional round: 4 games
Conference championships: 2 games
Super Bowl: 1 game
So, in total, there are 16×32+11=512+11=523 games in an NFL season, including the playoffs.
NBA
In a typical NBA season, each of the 30 teams plays 82 regular-season games.
During the playoffs, there are a total of 15 series, with each series being a best-of-seven format:
First round: 8 series
Conference semifinals: 4 series
Conference finals: 2 series
NBA Finals: 1 series
So, in total, there are 82×30+15×7=2460+105=2565 games in an NBA season, including the playoffs.
Disclaimer: These numbers were hastily ripped off ChatGPT and are not 100% accurate, off by 0.1-1% or so. The reason I didn't bother to double check them is because it's the ratio of games between the NBA and NFL that is the interesting part, in this case around 2500:500. The exact amount of games each league plays in a season is irrelevant to the discussion, but of course it's good to be accurate.
Next time I'll add a disclaimer that ChatGPT was used.
Only 17 games a season but each game does massive numbers, it’s a stadium sport so a lot more tickets to be sold, more opportunities for ads given how many breaks there are in football
Yes the NFL brings in significantly more revenue overall and is by far the greatest revenue producing sports league in the world.
If they bring in so much more money and play 1/5 of the games, why are the NBA so dead set on playing 82?
82 is just way too many games to pay attention to the regular season IMO. You have a much longer playoffs in the NBA as well.
I wish they'd cut the amount of NBA games to 1 away and 1 at home, like it is in soccer. That would make it 58 games per year, plus playoffs. Then if you really want to add a few games back you could do it through the IST.
Games just don't matter in the regular season and I find it hard to care or tune in. It would fuck up the longevity records for sure which is a big deal, but if the NFL can play so much fewer games and still make record profits, couldn't it work for the NBA?
I think if TV money was the only consideration, that logic might fly. However I think you're ignoring/discounting the revenue teams bring in from home games too much. Doubt there are many owners that want to give up 12 home games worth of ticket and concession sales.
Also, pretty sure the NFL has tried to push for more games in the past, and the players union pushed back.
Tradition, basketball is a lot less dangerous sport, players can play 82 and have since the beginning, lots of tickets to be sold.
It means less short-term profit. Reducing the number games could in theory create more long-term profits. Because less games means more time to practice and more time which means that you have more quality games(quality over quantity). But most owners do not care about long term benefits because maybe next year they are not going to be owners of their franchise.
I wish they'd cut the amount of NBA games to 1 away and 1 at home, like it is in soccer. That would make it 58 games per year, plus playoffs. Then if you really want to add a few games back you could do it through the IST.
This is going to make the regular season even more meaningless. The reason why playoffs exist in the American sport is because the schedule is unbalance. It would be unfair to determine the champion with playoffs when you are playing equal number of games against every team in the league. Imagine Man City finishing the season on 100 points and then they lose the title because they get knocked out by Tottenham in a play off semi.
The NBA doesn’t want to lose the ticket revenue that comes from the extra tickets sold for those 20-30 games. They also sell the packages based on having so much inventory/games to sell.
What, you want to cater the sport to better a TV deal? WTF is this thinking? Maybe you want to cut football (soccer for some) game to 5minutes, because you know there isn't much of the action for like 99% of the game?
82 regular season games worked fine for decades for NBA, it used to be exciting to watch regular season games in the past. Their ratings are suffering not because of NBA structure, but other issues (no rule enforcement, meaningless contracts, player attitude to competition, etc), and plus the fact that audience these days has attention span of the fish.
NFL teams play 17 games each, not 16.
I like how 1) even your simple math is off. They play 17 NFL games now and you added up the playoff games wrong (13 vs 11). You also just assumed every NBA playoff series goes 7 games? Didnt even try to average them?
Second, this information is out there. You dont need basic game math and speculation. You can find out approximately what each game is worth media-wise to a network.
Does it matter? It's the total number that's the interesting part, 2500 vs 500. If it's off by 1% it's good enough. It's the ratio of games between the NFL and the NBA that was in question. If the specific numbers were more important I'd have put more effort in to double check them... but they're not in this case.
I asked ChatGPT, copy+pasted, took me like 2 minutes. I guess I should have put that as a disclaimer in the post at the bottom, that the math might not check out 100%, I'll do that next time. Using ChatGPT without flagging it first is a bit sketchy.
Idk man, I just dislike these type of statements, no offense. I got one just like it yesterday where a guy was complaining about the use of stats when comparing legacies saying;
without adding anything themselves to the conversation.
We're just having a discussion here, asking questions. If you have context to add, please do so. "This info is available online" can be an answer to almost everything, why even bother talking to each other?
It’s pretty simple.
The average NFL game last year drew 17.9M per game on average.
The average NBA game drew 1.6M.
The NFLs LEAST watched Thursday Night Game drew 7.98M.
The NBAs MOST watched game across the whole season drew 5.013M.
The leagues aren’t even comparable lmfao
Your numbers are just way off to the point that you can't even make that 1% claim. First, 2 teams play each game, so you're double counting regular season games. Second, NBA playoff series have closer to 5.5 games on average (I glanced at data and it's somewhere between 5 and 6). Third, the NFL plays a 17 game schedule. Fourth, you missed the play-in and in season tournament. Fifth, you aren't including preseason games, but I think those are okay to neglect as long as you mention you are doing it. They do get decent viewership for the NFL, though. This is all before you get into other discussions about the numbers.
Here's how the math should look:
NFL:
32 Teams play 17 games: 272 regular season games
Playoffs are 6 wildcard, 4 divisional, 2 championship and 1 Super Bowl for 13 games
Total: 285 games per year
NBA:
30 teams play 82 games: 1230 regular season games
In season tournament championship: 1 game
Play-ins: 4 games
Playoff series (5.5 games on average) are 8 first round, 4 second round, 2 conference championships, 1 finals for 82.5 games on average.
Total: 1317.5 games per year on average
The NBA has about 4.6 times as many games per year on average, so off by far more than your 1%. You can't claim to be 1% off without ever seeing the actual numbers. You also can't just blindly rely on ChatGPT because it's dumb. It's an incredibly helpful tool when used properly, but you have to check it.
These numbers are also irrelevant without other information because there is an opportunity cost to programming since there is other media the channels could air instead of sports in these slots. A product with less events but way higher viewership per event is going to be more valuable than a product with more events and lower viewership per event that sums out to about the same number of total viewers. This is why the playoffs in every North American sport are pretty much universally more valuable than the regular season.
The NBA plays 1,230 regular season games and one in season tournament final game and then the playins and 4 rounds of from 4 to 7 games. The NBA does not p;ay 2,500 games(if that's the number you're quoting) because all teams play against another NBA team so it's 82 times 30 then you cut that number in half.
TNT/TBS' parent company Warner Brothers Discovery has lost (and is still losing) a lot of cash. They have been cutting costs wherever they can. NBC simply outbid them.
WBD is not losing a lot of cash. It had an EBITDA of almost $22B last year and a positive cash flow. It has a negative net income because of accounting tricks likely still related to the merer.
Doesn’t matter. They’re cutting costs and programs.
I mean, it does matter. You said something that factually isn't true. They are absolutely cutting costs, but it's not because they are burning cash.
My understanding is that the “B Package” is the company that serves as the secondary national broadcast partner. The “A Package” is the primary broadcast channel/station for coverage.
Edit:
The “B Package” currently consists of: All-Star weekend, regular season games, early round playoff games and alternating conference finals. The highlight of the new “C Package” appears to be the Play-in tournament.
Yeah, ESPN has the rights to the Finals. That's clearly the A package.
ESPN is so garbage in every possible way
Is the C package a new thing? If so, what else is in it and is there any chance Turner ends up with it?
I believe Amazon has already closed on the C package, which would mean Turner has no chance to end up with it.
It’s a new thing this year, as far as I know. Not sure what else is in it though.
It also includes some games as well
I think Peacock is the big factor here. It’ll be a way for NBC to drive subscriptions. The amount of people who subscribed to Peacock for an NFL playoff must have signaled to their executives that they’re getting a return on their investment. As for TNT, I’m not really sure why they didn’t hold on to the rights. My gut-feeling is that David Zaslav is really committed to budget-friendly programming that won’t cost too much and Inside the NBA doesn’t fit the mold of what he’s trying to do. IMO, he’ll come to regret that decision
Zaslav is trying to pay down the debt at WB-D. He said a while ago they don’t need the NBA. It’s most likely hubris but adding more billions to the company’s debt when you are trying to reduce it is possibly counterproductive. Warners and Discovery are such strange bed-fellows the merger never made sense
It's not adding more billions to the company's debt. It's just increasing opperating costs. Everyone who has lost the rights to a major sport has later regretted. This will probably be the same.
I concur they will regret it.
I forgot about the debt part of this, yes you’re 100% right about that
Depending on the price it will work for me. NBA games is the only thing that would get me to subscribe to peacock.
But, if it is like $50/month, I'll just pirate it. But for like $20/month I will get peacock for the NBA.
Peacock is like $10/month I think.
This sucks. There's nothing on peacock for me to sub for other than the NBA
Yeah playoff games on Peacock is gonna be brutal
The office, parks and rec, nfl, new movies that only stream there like Fast X, and now the NBA.
You can watch WWE
They had me with the rock and Ripley but they're both gone now
Rock was involved recently and will come back
WBD are being penny-wise and pound foolish. As you follow the arrow of time forward, it seems obvious that all live sports programming (with the NBA at nearer the top end of that category) will be relatively even more valuable than it is now, due to cord-cutting, bundle-streaming uncertainty, etc. Whatever WBD would have had to pay to keep the NBA would end up looking like a bargain.
Shortsighted thinking by the already demonstrably inept leadership of Zaslav.
I heard it might be the end of NBA TNT with Ernie, Shaq, Chuck, and kenny. Anyone know?
Ernie said he’d stay at TNT cause he’s been there forever and does other stuff there too. Chuck said he’d leave, don’t think the others have said anything.
But man even if they get the 3 together, will never be the same without Ernie. He’s the true goat of the show.
Chuck said he’d stay wherever Ernie goes
I saw chuck say he’ll “become a free agent” did he say different after that ?
“I wouldn’t go by myself,” said Barkley, “and I would find it hard to go without Ernie, to be honest with you. Obviously me, Kenny and Shaq are close, but Ernie is the guy. So I would have to look at if they were gonna bring those guys, but also if they had other guys in mind who to partner with. The good thing about it is, I got a two-year window that I don’t have to worry about anything.”
full article
Chuck will say he's leaving to get a fatter contract, so I wouldn't worry about him actually going until he actually goes.
What's stopping them from making an "Outside the NBA" podcast or something and making that Joe Rogan money?
Half of them have Joe Rogan money already and are 60+, Ernie is obligated to stay at tnt, and nobody really cares about Kenny like that
Thats a negotiation tactic from ernie. Remember when Chuck said he was going to retire? Then he signed a massive deal and got a cnn show.
If they pay enough I can see ernie working one day a week on a new show with the boys
If NBC is smart they will cut a deal with Turner to keep this crew together. Rent the studio from Turner, lease the rights to the show, and figure out how to pay all of the guys without necessarily making them NBC employees. The value of that crew is obvious: So many people tune in to games they don't give a shit about just to see what Inside the NBA has to say that night. It definitely feels like this deal should be doable at a price that makes sense to both NBC and Turner.
That being said I have close to zero confidence something like that will actually materialize until I hear otherwise.
I hope someone from NBC sees this
I hoping they cops at least lure 1-2 over and hire Candace Parker but now that she's at adidas that's likely out the window as well
Definitely the end. Turner continuing to pay them for a stand alone show without actual games on the channel makes no sense. They could go to Amazon but NBC seems unlikely.
They should just start a game companion podcast or something.
The only question that matters….Will the John Tesh banger be included in the deal?
Tesh obviously has nothing to do with this deal lol. But nbc can just call him and he will license it for them once again.
"No Tesh. No Deal"
Random Reddit User, AdamWK99 5-14-2024
I will also walk if Tesh is not included.
And will his brother come along?
I think one factor to this will probably also be the accessibility of NBC. You have to pay for cable for TNT but NBC you can get national games with an antenna for free. This could potentially reach more viewers and be attractive to advertisers. It’s part of why the NFL is so successful, yes fewer games mean every game matters but you can also watch Sunday night football for free and your local teams game for free and also the afternoon national game for free.
The NBA explicitly said this was a big deal. That said, NBC will almost definitely throw a bunch of games on USA so they can up the USA carriage fees from cable companies.
Yea USA and peacock will for sure be getting games and regional affiliates still. But having a national game of the week on NBC every week as well as getting the national ABC game in the heart of the season on weekends will really do stuff for the NBA wanting to promote their stars and get it in more houses, and hopefully get bigger checks from advertisers
this is all about streaming
Does this mean that we will not have to watch Draymond Green on these half time shows. I hope I’m not alone in thinking he’s not really that good- thinks he’s like JJ Reddick but he’s closer to Perkins
To be honest TNT wasn’t anything special outside of the halftime and post game show with Ernie and shaq etc. the program never really added much on the basketball side if things but was definitely entertaining.
Lately in these playoffs the games I'm watching their commentators have been far superior to ESPN's too.
ESPN is so shitty its fucking wild. But the reality is we all tune in to watch the games. Id love a crowd noise only no announcers button sometimes tho.
Brian Anderson underrated
Kevin Harlan and Brian Anderson are both just as vital as Inside IMO. TNT’s coverage is top to bottom amazing, from the pregame to the theme music.
NBC, Amazon, or ESPN will hire almost everyone that's currently at TNT. It just happened with the NHL. Almost all the main folks at NBC just migrated to TNT with some going to ESPN. Kevin Harlan and Brian Anderson will still be announcing games somewhere.
TNT's coverage is overrated.
Inside is great, and I do enjoy commentators like Harlan, Ian Eagle, and SVG. I even like Reggie Miller, although I understand that's an unpopular opinion. However, ESPN is no slouch there either: I love Mike Breen, Mark Jones, Hubie Brown, JJ Redick, and Richard Jefferson.
However, TNT also has a history of cutting into actual game time with commercials. There was a playoff game a few years ago; I think it was the Cavs-Pacers 2018 series where LeBron hit a gamewinner, and the leadup to that game winner was actually not even aired because they were airing commercials. Unacceptable.
Does this mean that we will not have to watch Draymond Green on these half time shows. I hope I’m not alone in thinking he’s not really that good- thinks he’s like JJ Reddick but he’s closer to Perkins
I do think there exists a point where networks are going to stop these mammoth increases at some point. The NBA is likely not going to be profitable for NBC at 2.5 billion for a B level package. The ad dollars brought in on the content are not likely to make the 3+ billion it needs to be profitable (gotta make up the 2.5 billion plus the ancillary costs to broadcast and such).
The deal is likely going to be a loss leader to the tune of 1 billion to 1.2 billion a year in terms of ad dollars vs. rights fees. But networks for the past 20 or so years have taken the losses on rights fees in order to drive up carrier fees and have the ancillary benefits of the packages (things like “brand halo”, promoting other shows during highly rated games and the other smaller impacts like bringing sponsors to special events).
But with NBA games having lower ratings now the promotional aspect is diminished and the losses on ads vs. rights fees being much higher it is going to hit a breaking point at some point. The carrying fees aren’t going to make up the difference for the losses and the secondary benefits aren’t enough to make up that difference either.
I think the NBA, NFL (esp the NFL), MLB and NHL will likely be fine relatively speaking. I don’t think with streaming platforms they are going to lack bidders for their content. But one day the huge 100-200% increases aren’t going to be there every 8-10 years the increases will probably look more like 30-40%.
If there is any chance they could just rent Ernie from TNT even just for some of the NBA studio work like maybe even just half the games. Like I know Ernie wants to stay with TNT but just loan him out for that and they can keep the whole crew together that's what they should do.
But I worry if you read some of these books about some of these dysfunctional showbiz behind the scenes stories like of producers and executives, etc. They're always very egotistical so the idea of getting the NBA and then just copy+pasting Inside the NBA over to NBC and not doing anything else would be almost like hurtful to their self-esteem. They'll probably want to try to do their own thing and justify their CEO pay and I worry it'll end up as bad as ESPN's coverage and halftime shows are
2.5 Billion sounds like a lot, but for the NBA, Jaylen Brown makes 286 million, so in a way, 11% of this deal is just to pay him. (not a criticism of JB, love him, just for perspective)
I’m pretty sure it’s 2.5 billion annually. Also, Jaylen Browns deal is multiple years.
$2.5 billion for the B package? I guess NBC thinks the NBA is really valuable (I guess it is come to think of it). I’m guessing to take the edge off they’re trying to negotiate rotating the Finals or something because that’s a lot of
How can Universal/NBC/Comcast afford an NBA rights deal when Comcast owes 88 billion in debt?