Another chapter was written in the NBA rights negotiations saga on Wednesday.
Days after TNT announced its intention to match the offer made by Amazon for NBA broadcasting rights, the league announced it will be moving forward with the Amazon offer.
“Warner Bros. Discovery’s most recent proposal did not match the terms of Amazon Prime Video’s offer and, therefore, we have entered into a long-term arrangement with Amazon," the NBA said in a statement. “Throughout these negotiations, our primary objective has been to maximize the reach and accessibility of our games for our fans. Our new arrangement with Amazon supports this goal by complementing the broadcast, cable and streaming packages that are already part of our new Disney and NBCUniversal arrangements. All three partners have also committed substantial resources to promote the league and enhance the fan experience.
“We are grateful to Turner Sports for its award-winning coverage of the NBA and look forward to another season of the NBA on TNT.”
It is a bit of an odd and complicated situation that will likely only get more so before its conclusion.
If you have not been keeping up, here's the gist: Over the last few months the NBA has been negotiating with Amazon, NBC, and ESPN on a new media rights deal that would kick in following the 2024-25 season. Reports value the deal collectively at roughly $76 billion over 11 years. Warner Bros., which owns TNT, announced on Monday that it intended to exercise a clause in its contract from the previous media rights deal which allowed TNT to match another offer made to the NBA. In this case, TNT matched the Amazon offer reportedly worth $1.8 billion. Now the NBA is claiming the network did not, in fact, match the offer and will go ahead with Amazon rather than TNT.
It does not seem like TNT will simply walk away empty-handed from the situation, and so it doesn't seem that the end of the journey is here. But it is now, officially, very likely that TNT will lose NBA rights after next season—a very disappointing development for fans of Inside The NBA, the award-winning studio show that covers games weekly for the network deep into the postseason.
The end of an era is fast approaching.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as NBA Goes Forth With Amazon Rights Deal, Says TNT Failed to Match Offer.
