As part of a 30-minute conversation with ESPN analyst Bob Myers at the Sports Business Journal’s CAA World Congress of Sports, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Tuesday that his most significant focus right now is solving the league’s issue with in-market games being “almost, you could say, trapped” in legacy media and cable.
While he also shared thoughts on franchise expansion (“not a foregone conclusion”) and global expansion (he wants to ”plant flags all over the world”), his most direct comments focused on regional sports networks (RSNs).
Silver told Myer that rights fees have taken a “25% hit collectively; for some teams it’s around a 50% reduction.” While noting that “I think we’ll work through that,” he added that “two-thirds of the NBA teams are operating with RSNs that just came out of bankruptcy [Main Street Sports Group] or some that were completely defunct [AT&T SportsNet].”
“I … hate to make it so negative, but [local game broadcasts] are caught in legacy media, which is rapidly declining,” Silver said. “And our young fans, in particular, we used to talk about cord-cutters; they’re really cord-nevers. It’s not part of their lives to buy cable… And so the local situation by definition will then get even worse.”
While national NBA ratings finished down just 2% across ABC, ESPN, and TNT, local NBA viewership found itself down 13% on average (based on data from 25 of the league’s 30 teams). Along with cord-cutting, the movement of RSNs into higher (and more expensive) cable tiers is impacting viewership.
As Tom Friend at SBJ notes, the league is “ideating and simultaneously shopping to streaming services such as Amazon, YouTube, Apple and potentially ESPN+ and Roku” as a potential solution to this problem.
“I actually think we’re undervaluing live sports right now and the specialness around it,” added Silver, who predicted that the creation of customized game streams could help the NBA make “the Manning Cast, but on steroids.”
ESPN/Knicks announcer Mike Breen probably isn’t thrilled to hear Silver’s comments on RSNs but it’s the way of the world now. Just ask the NFL, MLB, and most other pro sports leagues and their media deals.