A complete picture of the NBA’s local viewership situation is coming into focus.
After Puck’s John Ourand reported earlier this month that local NBA viewership was down 13% versus last season (using data from only 25 of the league’s 30 teams), Tom Friend of Sports Business Journal is now reporting that the NBA’s decline was just 9% league-wide. That figure, based off Nielsen data, likely excludes the Toronto Raptors, who are not measured by Nielsen.
Per Friend, eight teams saw year-over-year increases, with the top five being the Cleveland Cavaliers, Portland Trail Blazers, Boston Celtics, Houston Rockets, and Detroit Pistons. The bottom five included the Philadelphia 76ers, Chicago Bulls, Phoenix Suns, Utah Jazz, and Miami Heat.
On a team-by-team basis, local distribution can have a significant impact on year-over-year figures. For instance, the Trail Blazers moved from very limited distribution on Root Sports last season to an over-the-air deal that made games free to access with an antenna. As a result, the team increased viewership by 109%, despite winning just 36 games.
But broadly speaking, the league’s overall local viewership decline came down to the performance of large-market teams. Chicago and Philadelphia, two of the five largest media markets in the country, both underachieved and missed the playoffs this season. They saw declines of 58% and 41% respectively. The Bulls were especially hamstrung by their lack of distribution on Comcast’s cable systems, which is the largest pay TV provider in the area.
“Local ratings are very much driven by which teams that year exceeded expectations and had all the casual fans come in to join the ride,” Gregg Liebman, head of research at Playfly Sports told SBJ.
Teams that gained viewership largely came from smaller markets like Cleveland and Portland, which weren’t enough to offset the losses in the large markets.
“So when you have teams like the Cavaliers, Pistons, the Thunder and the Rockets be the teams that exceeded expectations by a large degree — those are smaller market teams,” Liebman continued. “And when you have some of the bigger market teams like Philadelphia and Chicago and Dallas, where the fans have a certain expectation coming into the year and they underachieve, that’s when you start seeing a bit of tune-out. So year-to-year comparisons in our world, I understand it’s a reality, but unfortunately, doesn’t always represent the overall interest and health of the league.”
The saving grace for local NBA viewership this season was streaming, which saw a 30% year-over-year bump based on a sample of one-third of the league. And those viewers that opted to watch on streaming services stayed longer than on traditional television by about 30 minutes.
That shift is emblematic of the league’s overall media strategy going forward.
“Right now, the default is that every [national] game is on linear and some of those games are simulcast on streaming,” NBA EVP of media distribution Scott Kaufman-Ross told SBJ. “We actually thought about it in the reverse: we wanted to make sure every game was available via streaming, and then we were simulcasting some of those games on linear because we think that’s what the next 11 years are going to look like.”
These next few years will be a volatile period for the NBA when it comes to local broadcasts. With distribution on linear television increasingly a challenge for many teams, and team-owned streaming services still in their infancy, it’s hard to predict what the viewership landscape will look like five years from now. It’s especially difficult when acknowledging that team performance is a key factor as well.
With the NBA, like MLB, eyeing a nationalized package of local broadcasts to sell to the likes of Amazon, Google, or another tech giant, taking a streaming-first approach might be a wise decision for the league. If that’s the case, linear television numbers are bound to continue their decline.