There have been wars that have been started, fought, and resolved faster than the process for the NBA agreeing to new media deals. The biggest holdup in the protracted saga has been the much ballyhooed “matching rights” that Warner Bros. Discovery has in their back pocket to try to keep hold of some slice of the NBA piece. And it’s clear that in this round of negotiations, the NBA has learned their lesson.
According to a new report, the NBA will not have a matching rights provision for the new triumvirate of presumed broadcast partners – ESPN, NBC, and Amazon – as part of the league’s next media contracts.
Via The Athletic :
While the NBA remains in a media rights purgatory, waiting to see if and how Warner Bros. Discovery will use its matching rights to try to retain a part of the league’s new rights package, it has ensured that this high-stakes game of corporate chicken won’t happen again the next time around.
The NBA’s new media rights agreements do not contain matching rights for Disney, NBC and Amazon — the three companies that have come together to pay the league roughly $75 billion over 11 years — according to industry sources briefed on the deals. The new rights deals will kick in with the start of the 2025-26 NBA season. They also include roughly a $2.2 billion, 11-year payout for the WNBA as that league’s next rights deal.
This move is a no-brainer from the NBA after WBD’s matching rights have become a significant roadblock to finalizing the contracts with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon. In fact, while the NBA has reportedly structured the contracts in a way that WBD would be unable to match the reach of the new contracts with NBC and Amazon respectively, WBD has gone back and forth in the media on whether or not they wanted to challenge that stance with some kind of legal battle.
As it stands now, the ball is in the court of WBD CEO David Zaslav if he and the company want to attempt to match a deal ( likely Amazon in particular ) in a hail mary attempt to save the beloved product that is the NBA on TNT.
By all accounts to this point, WBD would likely fail in their endeavor because they can’t offer the kind of broadcast reach (NBC) or streaming power (Amazon) that the NBA’s new partners have. So WBD can choose to get the lawyers involved and make things even more complicated in trying to carve out some NBA inventory or finally admit defeat.
Thankfully for all of us, we won’t have to live through the drama a second time around.
[ The Athletic ]
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