NBA Commissioner Adam Silver spoke after yesterday’s Board of Governor’s meeting, addressing questions that mostly centered around the Clippers and Kawhi Leonard’s potentially cap-circumventing endorsement deal with the now-bankrupt company Aspiration. But tucked in the middle of it all was a viral misstep that shows how far the league really is from figuring out the current broadcast landscape.
He was asked about the expense of watching NBA games, and the fracturing of games across many platforms. As part of his response, he said “there’s a huge amount of our content that people essentially consume for free. This is very much a highlights-based sport, so Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, you name it, any service, the New York Times for that matter, to the extent that your content is not behind a paid firewall, there’s an enormous amount of content out there. YouTube, another example that is advertising-based that consumers can consume.”
All of this is true, but it comes off as tone-deaf at a critical time for the league. It’s not exactly “let them eat cake,” but the image of the league’s boss standing at a lectern and essentially saying ‘let them watch highlights’ during the biggest financial boom the league has seen is not how the league should be portraying itself.
Let’s get this out of the way: No league commissioner should be devaluing the watching of entire games. Even if it’s true that NBA highlights are broadly consumed on social media, the league is selling games with advertisers who have paid a lot of money. No one at Amazon or NBC should be excited about Silver’s declaration that this is a highlights-based league.
Instead of coming up with affordable options for people, like cheaper NBA-only packages on Amazon or Peacock, or the ability to buy specific games at a low price, Silver pushed social media and outdated concepts of finding free coverage.
“We’re going from essentially 15 exposures on broadcast television to 75,” Silver said. “So to the extent someone wants to put little rabbit ears on their television, you can still get 75 marquee games in essence for free in the marketplace.”
Raise your hand if you still have rabbit ears.
NBA content is perfect for social media, which is a blessing and a curse. Most amazing plays can be shown from start to finish in five seconds or less. Almost all of those hit social feeds within a minute or two of them happening. Anyone following the right accounts can get a sense of the league’s biggest plays on any given night just by scrolling through a couple of apps.
And while scores and a few highlights are great for busy fans who didn’t get a chance to sit and watch a whole game on a given night, it’s not how the league should be consumed on a daily basis. Not only does an overreliance on highlights skew what’s really happening in the league, it sets an unrealistic example of what the game really is. When a young generation of NBA fans gets their first taste of the game through social media, the game itself can be underwhelming.
That's what makes these next few years so critical for the league. The NBA needs to be careful about how it embraces the highlights culture and how it connects it to the actual product. This new TV and streaming deal has created big new revenue sources, but if the league isn’t careful, it can also create a disconnect to the sport.
A month ago, Peacock emailed subscribers to announce price hikes of $3 per month or $30 per year, depending on the plan. Amazon Prime now costs $14.99 a month or $139 annually. The YouTube TV base plan has risen to $82.99 per month. A Hulu plan with live TV and ESPN costs the same. Fans who want to catch all of their favorite team’s games are paying more and more at every turn for games that are in different places.
“I think this is a new world now of streaming media. I think we’re paying a lot of attention to that,” Silver said. “It was one of the discussions we had with our media partners, not just the cost of the games — and I think most people are conditioned to paying a certain amount for high-value content — but also the discovery of those games.”
Long-time fans are going to get frustrated. The games are harder to find and more expensive to watch. There is fertile ground here for hard-working fans getting turned off by getting nickel-and-dimed by streamers while players make $60-plus million per year. Fans are already getting priced out of going to games, they don’t need to get priced out of watching at home.
“We think a lot about it,” Silver said. “We know where we have mass appeal. On a global basis, we’re literally reaching billions of people. We don’t want to disenfranchise people by working with partners that are creating price points that make it inaccessible to them.”
Highlights are great, and the NBA certainly would rather people see their great plays while scrolling through their phones as opposed to non-NBA content. But this issue is more pressing than the league seems to let on. Everything is more expensive, and money has to be spent more wisely. The ‘let them watch highlights’ attitude the Commissioner expressed, whether intentional or not, is the wrong message to be sending right now.