Disney, AOL TW hoop it up
NBA expected to take in about $765 million a year
The six-year deals, which begin with the 2002-03 season, call for games to be split between Disney's ABC and ESPN and AOL Time Warner's TNT. The NBA and AOL TW also will team to create a 24-hour cable sports channel.
Disney-owned ABC and ESPN will pony up $2.4 billion, with AOL Time Warner chipping in $2.2 billion. The NBA is expected to take in about $765 million a year, a 25% increase from the $615 million the league earned annually in TV rights under the four-year, $2.6 billion deals with NBC and Turner Sports that expire after this season.
It's far from certain that those bets will pay off for the two congloms. NBC opted to drop out of the bidding because it lost a reported $100 million on the NBA last year alone. An even bigger loss is projected for this season, and ratings are down almost 35% from five years ago.
But ABC TV chief Steve Bornstein insisted the prospective ratings are only part of the picture.
"If you look at how we can exploit the NBA brand across all our properties, that's the story for us," he said in a conference call.
All Sports Network
The working title for the new AOL-NBA network is All Sports Network (ASN), said Mark Lazarus, Turner Entertainment sales and marketing prexy and president of Turner Sports.
He said the NBA soon will be approaching cable operators about plans for the new web, which will "be a full and diverse sports network with NBA programming as a foundation, but not by any means the sole programming genre."
NBA commissioner David Stern said talks to develop the AOL sports net began in part as an attempt to retool AOL Time Warner's CNN/SI concept, "anchored in our season with NBA games" and potentially spawning projects across the media conglom's myriad properties.
Stern said the network will be distributed on AOL TW's 13 million-subscriber Time Warner Cable system, and the partners expect to get another 10 million subs' worth of distribution before launch.
Lots of games
The new network would air 96 regular-season NBA games and at least two NBA playoff games. It also may run classic NBA games, WNBA and NBA Development League programming, as well as auto racing, tennis, golf and college sports.
ABC will air 15 Sunday afternoon regular-season games, starting with a doubleheader Christmas Day, and will get its own cache of playoff games, including the highly rated NBA finals in primetime. The NBA's "Inside Stuff" will continue to air Saturday mornings.
ESPN will air 75 regular-season games, with one game Wednesday night and a doubleheader Friday nights. ESPN also gets the exclusive rights to the NBA Conference finals series, the NBA draft, a draft preview show and NBA draft lottery.
TNT will air 52 regular-season primetime games, 48 of which will be part of a Thursday night doubleheader. TNT also will air the NBA All-Star game and NBA All-Star Saturday evenings as well as the conference semifinals.
Shift toward cable
The schedules for thedeal rep a dramatic shift for the NBA away from broadcast outlets and toward cable -- a move Stern said the league has been asking for all along.
"The window that we have begins generally at Christmas Day to early January, and in order to make the nut, we had scheduled an enormous number of tripleheaders," he said. "It's hard to ask fans to watch eight and a half hours of anything, or to ask sponsors to support that kind of a load."
Tuesday's deal also expands the strategic alliance between the NBA and AOL, announced in June 2000. The NBA now will provide content to AOL members including free audiocasts of many NBA games.
