Turner Sports has partnered with Intel to broadcast weekly NBA on TNT games in virtual reality beginning with the 2018 NBA All-Star Weekend, which will be held Feb. 16-18, 2018. In the multi-year deal, Intel will become the exclusive provider of VR for the NBA on TNT and deliver live content for weekly matchups via its Intel True VR technology.
When its new season tips off Oct. 17, the NBA has ample reason for some optimism regarding seeing its audience numbers go up instead of down. That’s largely due to the mix of fascinating storylines spread broadly across many teams.
Despite two lopsided outcomes, Golden State’s two home wins over Cleveland averaged 19.6 million viewers. That’s an increase of 5% from the 18.6 million average in 2016.
NBA programming continues to reap big advertising revenue rewards through the first half of the 2015-16 season — even against some declining ratings. National TV advertising revenue for NBA programming is up 21% to $430.1 million across five networks — TNT, ESPN, ESPN2, ABC and NBA TV — according to iSpot.tv.
Exclusives
While league sponsors snapped up much of the in-game inventory, some newcomers managed to elbow their way into the lineup.
NEW YORK (AP) — TNT will use broadcast teams featuring only former players and no traditional play-by-play men during five NBA doubleheaders later this season. The “Players Only” schedule runs […]
The NBA has renewed its agreement and will nearly triple the content it puts on the app for the 2016-17 season. As with last season, Snapchat will cover weekly games with Live Stories, and this year NBA bitmoji and selfie Lenses are also in the mix.
TNT is adding a Monday night doubleheader package to its NBA coverage, starting with an NBA Finals rematch on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The Cleveland Cavaliers will visit the […]
The National Basketball Association on Thursday announced it was pulling next February’s All-Star Game from Charlotte to protest a state law that eliminated anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. All-Star weekend is one of the flashiest and most lucrative events on the league’s annual schedule.
Through four games, the series is averaging 17.4 million total viewers, making it the second-most-watched finals ever on ABC. It’s another reminder of how important sports are to broadcast.
NBA’s networks TNT, ESPN and ABC all witnessed higher national advertising revenues so far through three rounds of the NBA playoff season.
National TV advertising revenue for the just-completed 2015-16 NBA regular season witnessed sharp growth over the previous year. Marketers spent $487.8 million in national TV advertising from mid-October to mid-April, according to iSpot.tv. This compares to $329.8 million for the 2014-15 season.
NEW YORK (AP) — Veteran announcer Marv Albert has agreed to a multiyear contract extension with TNT to call NBA games. Albert will no longer work the NCAA Tournament […]
Once the domain of true crime series and procedural drama reruns, Saturday nights are suddenly getting a lot more competiteve on broadcast TV. This weekend, ABC tips off the first of eight Saturday night NBA telecasts, the first national prime-time package for the league on broadcast television.
The legal chaos that imperils the daily fantasy sports (DFS) industry now officially threatens the professional sports leagues, media companies and financial institutions that have become partners with the two leading DFS companies, DraftKings and FanDuel. Two Florida-based DFS customers e-filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida against approximately 50 companies and individuals that have either invested in DFS companies or facilitated DFS gaming. Among those named are Turner Sports, Time Warner, NBC Sports Comcast Ventures, 21st Century Fox and Fox Sports Interactive Media.
Sources familiar with the pending deal say that the agreement would include intellectual property and other traditional sponsorship rights but is centered on content — which Verizon wants for over-the-top programming efforts, especially its recently launched go90 product. As a mobile-first service, go90 is aimed at the growing audience of millennial cord-cutters.
Last week’s Golden State Warriors-New Orleans Pelicans NBA Opening Night matchup marked the first time a U.S. major sports league live-streamed a game in virtual reality. In addition to the game itself at Oakland’s Oracle Arena, the NBA, Turner Sports and NextVR teamed up to live-stream the Warriors’ NBA Championship ring ceremony in VR prior to tipoff.
Primetime rematches of June’s highly rated NBA Finals matchup between the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers highlight the league’s 2015-16 broadcast schedule, announced on Wednesday. One of the changes of this coming season’s television schedule is that half of ABC’s 16-game slate will be spotlighted as part of a new NBA Saturday Night on ABC franchise that tips off Jan. 23.
ABC is opening up another night of NBA action, adding Saturday games for next season. The eight-game slate will tip off Jan. 23, 2016, and run twice a month through the rest of the season, with games starting at 8:30 p.m. ABC is coming off its most-watched NBA Finals since it began airing the NBA in the 2002-03 season.
As the 2014-15 NBA season comes to a close this week — with ABC’s coverage of the Finals drawing their highest ratings in more than a decade — the league is looking at presenting basketball fans with some new viewing options in the fall. Starting with the 2015-16 season that tips off in late October, fans will have the opportunity to purchase single games, individual-team packages or the traditional package of nearly 1,000 live out-of-market games (featuring all 30 teams) throughout the regular season.
The peculiar credit appears at the end of NBA finals broadcasts on ABC. There is no reason for this single line to be shown publicly. The information it conveys is irrelevant to viewers and is an example of a major entertainment company speaking publicly to itself. But it tells you why NBA games are carried by ABC, whose once-dominant sports division was buried long ago. “The preceding program has been paid for by ESPN Inc.,” the credit reads after the announcer Mike Breen gives his end-of-game remarks.
ABC’s Summer Play: Riding The NBA
Finals will lift the network to No. 1 the first month, in a reversal of the regular season, when the network lags its rivals because of its lack of sports programming.
With the NBA regular season opening tonight, owners, general managers, players and agents are all grappling with the unprecedented change to the fundamental economic picture that emerged with the league’s new televsion contract: $24 billion, nearly tripling the league’s revenues on an annual basis.
If the NBA sells corporate advertising on game jerseys, which many believe is inevitable, network partners Turner and ESPN will get certain spending guarantees related to those contracts — a development that was negotiated as part of the league’s massive nine-year, $24 billion media deals. But that’s where the clarity ends, because the details of what the networks will receive — and from whom — remain as undefined as the league’s future policy on selling jersey advertising.
On Monday the National Basketball Association confirmed it has extended its current rights deals with Turner Networks and Disney, parent company of ESPN and ABC, through the 2024-2025 season. The new deal is impressive: It’s worth double what the networks paid for the last deal, which will expire after the 2015-16 season. Right now Disney, whose ABC carries the NBA finals, pays $485 million per year. Turner pays $445 million. The TV rights portions of the deals are expected to remain the same. But what might be most interesting about the new deal is the digital aspect.
The National Basketball Association is widely expected to renew its current TV-rights deals with Walt Disney’s ESPN and Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting, according to a person familiar with the situation. The deals, which Sports Business Journal reported in September are likely to be worth more than $2 billion overall, would leave other media companies that may have hoped to add NBA games to their programming rosters, including NBC and Fox, in the lurch.
The NBA and its network partners expect to reach an agreement in principle on new long-term media deals by the start of the regular season, according to sources on all sides of the discussions. Talks have progressed so rapidly that details are emerging on a massive agreement that would see the league’s annual rights fee more than double, with ESPN and Turner combining to pay more than $2 billion per year on average.
As the networks start negotiations with the league on a new TV deal, ESPN and Turner want more assurances they won’t be locked into bad matchups at the end of the season. Network execs have made it known to the league they want the same type of flex scheduling the NFL uses for NBC’s Sunday Night Football to ensure that a Bryant-less Lakers don’t have an exclusive national TV audience on a Thursday night or a Sunday afternoon.
The basketball league has reportedly reached a $500 million deal to resolve a lingering headache from the 1970s NBA-ABA merger.
The NBA is poised to become the first major U.S.-based sports league to allow its games to be streamed live locally. The league is finalizing TV Everywhere deals with Fox Sports Media Group and NBC Sports Group, the country’s two biggest owners of regional sports networks.
On Monday, the league will announce it is renewing three of its major long-term partnership deals — with Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, PesicCo Inc.’s Gatorade and AutoTrader.com.
