ESPN, TNT Renew NBA Deals, ABC Exclusive Home Of NBA Finals

by Wayne Friedman , October 6, 2014

Live TV sports content continues to sharply climb in price as ESPN and Turner Sports renew their respective NBA contracts for nine years.

Both network groups will get more games -- as well as more digital extensions to their deals through the 2024-2025 season.

Financial details were not released for the new contracts, starting in the 2016-2017 season. However, reports suggest that ESPN’s and Turner’s deals will each double to around $1 billion apiece. ESPN pays $485 million and Turner, $445 million, for their current respective deals.

ESPN and its sister network ABC will get 10 extra regular-season games -- to 100 -- as well as 10 more exclusive regular-season games.

ABC will continue to be the exclusive home for the NBA Finals. ESPN and ABC will have 44 post-season games.
ESPN will get 750 new hours of NBA programming for both its linear and digital platforms. ESPN will also extend its deal with the WNBA until 2025.

Regular NBA season ratings on ABC sank to a Nielsen 2.3 household rating for this past season from a 2.3 the year before. Turner’s TNT will add 12 live regular-season games -- now totaling 64 regular-season games. TNT will have exclusive Thursday Night regular-season doubleheaders, and will be the home of NBA Opening Night.

Turner will get an all-new NBA Awards Show. In addition, Turner will have enhanced digital rights to NBA content for Bleacher Report digital platform.

Although ESPN has conference finals and the NBA Finals, TNT will have more overall NBA Playoff games -- first-round coverage, exclusive second-round game telecasts and one Conference Finals. Turner will to manage NBA’s digital platforms -- NBA TV, NBA.com, NBA mobile, NBA League Pass, WNBA.com & NBADLeague.com.

cable tv, sports, tv

2 comments about "ESPN, TNT Renew NBA Deals, ABC Exclusive Home Of NBA Finals".

Check to receive email when comments are posted.

Steve Beverly from Union Broadcasting System, October 6, 2014 at 2:02 p.m.
Wayne, you better have MediaPost check this headline. I don't think ESPN or TNT are renewing "NBC" deals.
Reply

Patrick Trybus from Hunter Hagan & Co., October 7, 2014 at 2:24 a.m.

The amount of money that ESPN and Turner Sports have to respectively pay the NBA for coverage of basketball games is quite crazy. The new deals of nine years for approximately one billion dollars equals to about $111,111,111 per year, just to air basketball. I think these television contracts illustrate how much the sport has grown over the past years, and how popular the sport is becoming in the United States. Although this number isn’t as high as contracts to show NFL games, (roughly $1 billion dollars per year), the fact that the costs doubled showed that the trend in the sport is increasing. With all the extra games and the more extensive coverage of playoff basketball, I believe the interest in the sport will increase at a much more rapid pace than it is currently. I think the NBA has been benefitting from the prior years of great NBA playoff basketball success that they have had compared to recent years. The greatest stars the NBA has to offer have been making deep playoff runs on their respective teams, thus increasing the attraction of fans to watch basketball longer into the season. I think this might also play into the reason of the large increase in the contract prices that ESPN and Turner Sports have to pay. If it wasn’t for the past two years of entertaining NBA finals games, then there wouldn’t be double the value of the sport in terms of broadcasting on the television. So even though the price of the contracts seems high to myself, I believe the value of this deal might benefit ESPN and Turner Sports in the long-run.