The high-profile dispute could take the parties to court and keep the outcome of the NBA’s broadcast rights murky for the foreseeable future.
“We are proud of the way we have provided basketball players with the highest level of protection throughout our four-decade partnership with the NBA. In an effort to continue our partnership of “For a long time, during exclusive and non-exclusive negotiations, we worked in good faith to present strong offers that were fair to both parties,” TNT, formerly known as Turner Sports, wrote in the sentence.
“We look forward to the NBA fulfilling our new contract,” TNT added.
An NBA spokesperson said the league has received WBD’s offer and is reviewing it.
The NBA can either compete or accept the offer, meaning TNT will only take the Amazon deal. If the league contests it, as expected, WBD would have the option of suing the league.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.
The NBA is poised to collect monster deals from ESPN, Comcast and Amazon in its new round of deals that will take effect after next season. According to media reports and people familiar with the deals, ESPN will pay $2.6 billion a year for the NBA Finals, among other games; Comcast, which owns NBC, will pay $2.5 billion for regular season games and playoff games; and Amazon will pay $1.8 billion for a smaller package that still includes the playoffs and the conference finals series. (TNT’s public statement did not specify that it was specifically in agreement with the Amazon sale.)
The league had a special negotiation window with its former partners, ESPN of Disney and TNT with WBD, which ended in April, and spent several months finalizing its new agreements. But according to people familiar with the previous deals, those networks have so-called back-end compatibility rights, which make it difficult for a network or broadcaster to dump a media partner. news.
How strong these same rights are can be debatable. The NBA hopes its terms with Amazon are so different that WBD’s proposal isn’t a real game. Amazon provides the streaming platform, and TNT is the online network. And Prime Video has more subscribers than WBD’s streaming platform, Max. Inside TNT, however, there is a belief that distribution points are less important than Amazon’s financial position, with which it will compare.
A person familiar with the negotiations said WBD has made several attempts to reach a new deal with the league, including picking up a fourth minor league game and trying to sign up Google’s YouTube to partner with Amazon’s joint venture. .
TNT has broadcast the NBA since 1989 and is the league’s longest-standing media partner. Presents the venerable “Inside the NBA” pregame and postgame show, featuring Charles Barkley, one of the most popular figures in sports media. Barkley has been critical of TNT after reports in recent months surfaced on the network can lose the NBA. “These people that I work with, they’ve ruined this thing, obviously,” Barkley told the “Dan Patrick Show” in May.
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