There’s just one minor issue: WBD appears to believe it’s contractually entitled to a share of the NBA broadcast agreement if it matched the bid for it—which, in Amazon’s case, was reportedly $1.8 billion per year.
WBD’s statement earlier this week referred to the “matching rights provision” as “an integral part of our current agreement and the rights we have paid for under it.” WBD’s statement implied that it “matched” an offer, which would “allow fans to keep enjoying our unparalleled coverage, including the best live game productions in the industry and our iconic studio shows and talent while building on our proven 40-year commitment for many more years.”
The NBA did not clarify which portions of the agreement WBD did not match but disagreed with WBD’s assessment while acknowledging a potentially awkward year of coverage ahead before the new media rights deal kicks in during the 2025-26 season.
“We are grateful to Turner Sports for its award-winning coverage of the NBA and look forward to another season of the NBA on TNT,” the statement noted.
Bottom line
Warner Bros. Discovery entered 2024 with roughly $45 billion in debt and a seeming willingness to offload costly sports properties. Yet it featured the NBA and host Charles Barkley prominently at this year’s upfront presentation.
It’s hard to break away from the NBA entirely when it has so many fans among brands. During the 2023-24 basketball season, television data and analytics firm EDO found that the league produced more than 56 billion impressions for its advertisers across more than 29,000 airings. That made the full NBA season four times more impactful for advertisers than the average primetime program.
As the NBA regular season wore on, viewers were 12% more likely to engage with an ad during an NBA game than during the average primetime broadcast—up 15% from a season before. Once the playoffs began, viewers were 39% more likely to interact with an ad during game time than in primetime. That put the NBA second only to the National Football League in effectiveness for advertisers.
From the league’s perspective, stronger streaming only improves its game.
With 78% of NBA advertisers on linear networks also advertising on the league’s streaming broadcasts, SponsorUnited sees more opportunity for that hesitant 22% to join streaming channels. Bob Lynch, founder and CEO of SponsorUnited, previously told ADWEEK that Amazon—which already partners with the NBA for WNBA games—and other streamers help the league and its advertisers find fans and sell to them more directly.
