NBA Signs New TV Deals with ESPN, Turner

New York - The National Basketball Association has renewed its TV deals with its current partners ESPN and Turner.

The league announced the new media rights agreements at a press conference Monday morning. The agreements run through 2024-25.

The multiyear agreements are expected to be worth more than $2 billion annually, according to multiple reports, which would be more than double the current payouts from the two networks. The leagues current deals are set to expire following the 2015-16 season.

Along with Turners TNT and Disneys ESPN and ABC maintaining their TV rights, the NBA will also work with ESPN to create an over-the-top network that will air live games.

Turner said that its new nine-year deal gives it 12 more live regular season games on TNT each year, plus expanded digital rights.

TNT will televise 64 regular season games a year. In addition to its Thursday night doubleheaders, TNT will air the 12 additional live games on another night of the week during the second half of the season. Turner will have NBA Opening Night, exclusive coverage of the NBA All-Star Weekend and more playoff games than any other network. Turner plans to create a new NBA Awards show and additional programming around the beginning of the season and the start of the playoffs.

Turner Sports will also maintain TV Everywhere rights that allows for all NBA content airing across Turner Broadcasting networks to be streamed live across the companys multiple digital platforms. Additionally, Turner will have enhanced digital rights to have the NBA deliver content for its Bleacher Report web service.

Turner Sports will also continue to manage NBA Digital, including NBA TV, NBA.com, NBA Mobile, NBA League Pass, WNBA.com and NBADLeague.com.

This is a significant deal for our company and we are pleased to continue our long-standing partnership with the NBA, its fans, owners and players, David Levy, president of Turner Broadcasting, said in a statement. The agreement locks in some of the most valuable, original, premium live sports programming that well continue to monetize across TNT and all other platforms within our extensive portfolio and will help further grow our businesses into the next decade.

ESPN gains 10 additional games from its existing deal (plus 10 additional exclusive windows) for either its own network or ABC, bringing the regular season total to 100. ABC maintains its exclusive rights to the NBA Finals as well.

As current rights holders, ESPN and Turner had an exclusive negotiating window that wasnt set to lift until the middle of next year; Fox had made it clear they wanted to grab NBA rights if they became available.

With the agreements, the NBA is not expected to make a third national rights package available for bidders, meaning Fox would be left out in the cold. The absence of a deal with NBA would strike a major blow to Fox Sports 1; Fox executives had made acquiring NBA rights a key move for the young network.

With the NFL and MLB each in the first year of their eight-year TV contracts and the NHL about to begin the fourth year of its pact, this means that the four major professional leagues are locked in well through the 2020s. The NCAAs Big Ten conferences media rights deal with ESPN expires in 2016.

Last season, the five-game NBA Finals between the LeBron James-led Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs - won by the Spurs 4-1 - averaged 15.5 million viewers (many of them in the adults 18-49 demo), behind the Super Bowl, BCS National Championship Game, NCAA Final Four and mens basketball championship game this year.

(Jon Lafayette contributed to this report)

LINK:	http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/programming/nba-signs-new-tv-dea...
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