Last week’s news of the highly coveted National Football League Sunday Ticket moving over to Google’s YouTube TV for Two Billion Dollars annually sent shockwaves through the sporting media streaming landscape. By leaving it’s legacy satellite television partner DIRECTV — sent shockwaves to cordcutters throughout the country. The most popular American sport agreed to move their digital rights package to a streaming media / internet provider.
Over the past two years, the National Hockey League, who has moved the mass majority of their streaming rights to Disney and the ESPN Plus streaming service.
Major League Baseball has taken some of their streaming games over to exclusive deals with AppleTV and NBC’s Peacock.
Major League Soccer will take their games over to AppleTV as well starting this season and will air every out of market game on their platform.
With all of these major professional sports changing streaming providers, that leaves only one major sport with a television contract that is about to expire.
The National Basketball Association’s current television deal is set to expire at the end of the 2024-2025 season. Currently, the NBA has national television partners of Warner Bros-Discovery Sports (formerly Turner Sports) and Disney/ESPN.
Local television rights are determined by the actual teams themselves with out-of-market games on the league’s streaming service called NBA League Pass. A few of teams such as the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers, Brooklyn Nets, New York Knicks and Denver Nuggets have their regional sports networks. The rest of the teams are affiliated with Bally Sports, (formerly owned by Fox Sports) their Regional NBC Sports Cable network and / or AT&T Sports Networks. The Toronto Raptors are with TSN (Canada’s version of ESPN) and SportsNet.