THE NATIONAL Basketball Association is closing in on media rights deals with Comcast-owned NBC, Disney’s ESPN, and Amazon.com that would generate about $76 billion in media revenue over 11 years, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Rights to the widely watched professional basketball league are a prized possession for media companies. Sports content continues to attract a reliable and loyal audience at a time when traditional TV businesses are losing millions of subscribers to cord-cutting.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report said that NBC would pay an average of $2.5 billion a year to the NBA under the arrangement and show around 100 games per season, with about half airing exclusively on Comcast’s Peacock streaming service.
Amazon’s package would amount to $1.8 billion a year and will include regular-season and playoff games and a share of the conference finals, which will be split in a rotation among the media partners, the report said.
Disney’s payments will average about $2.6 billion annually, more than the $1.5 billion it paid under the current deal, and will continue to air the NBA Finals though it will get fewer games under the new deal, the WSJ reported. — Reuters
