Warner Bros Discovery secures NBA rights extension after dispute

1:21 pm Monday, November 18th, 2024

(Reuters) -Warner Bros Discovery said on Monday it would have access to coveted National Basketball Association content for 11 more years under a legal settlement with the league, sending shares of the media company more than 5% higher.

The new agreement includes rights to use NBA content for the company’s TNT Sports, Bleacher Report and House of Highlights assets, as well as rights to broadcast live games in Nordic countries, Poland and Latin America, excluding Brazil and Mexico.

It does not include live games rights in the crucial U.S market, meaning TNT’s more than 40-year run of airing the league live would come to an end after the current season.

Warner Bros Discovery filed a lawsuit in July over the NBA’s rejection of its matching bid for media rights, after the league announced a $77 billion deal with Walt Disney’s ESPN, Comcast-owned NBCUniversal and Amazon.com.

“The settlement is a reasonable compromise that most NBA fans will welcome,” said Emarketer senior analyst Ross Benes.

“WBD’s lawsuit had tenuous odds, this concession is better than nothing.”

Rights to the widely watched professional basketball league are a prized possession for media companies as sports content has retained a reliable and loyal audience even as traditional TV businesses lose millions of subscribers to cord-cutting.

Warner Bros Discovery has also entered a separate agreement to license the popular, Emmy Award-winning show “Inside the NBA” to sports network ESPN. Doubts had risen about the future of the show, whose hosts include Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal, after the company lost rights to the league.

As part of the deal with ESPN, TNT Sports will televise 13 Big 12 football and 15 men’s basketball games, starting with the 2025 season.

The moves have “solidified long-term rights and revenue for WBD”, Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav said in a statement.

(Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva and Devika Syamnath)