The NBA's Next Decade Will Not Look Like Its Last
The eleven-year, $76 billion media rights deal was priced against a world that is already moving — generationally, geographically, and through the betting layer — out from under it.
In July 2024, the NBA announced that its next media rights cycle would be worth roughly $76 billion over eleven years, split across Disney, NBC, and Amazon. The first season under the new deal — 2025-26 — is wrapping up as I write this. The deal runs through 2035-36.
Eleven years is a long time.
I keep coming back to that duration. Eleven years ago was 2015. Snapchat was what teenagers were on. TikTok did not exist in the United States — ByteDance did not merge Musical.ly into TikTok in the US until August 2018. Netflix had not yet made Stranger Things, which premiered in July 2016. Regional sports networks were still a functioning business. Amazon did not carry its first NFL streams until the 2017 Thursday Night Football sublicense — and did not own exclusive NFL rights until the eleven-year Thursday Night Football deal that began in 2022. The idea that a single streaming service — any streaming service — would pay a league in the NBA’s range for rights would have sounded like a category error.