You may as well cut the cord and watch the NBA playoffs and finals without a cable or satellite subscription. Channels are already pulling the plug on sports broadcasts as we know them.
At the start of the National Basketball Association playoffs, I received a message from Chris Brantner, who goes by the handle Mr. Cable Cutter, asking if I’d like some information about how to circumvent cable and satellite and watch games without a subscription to those services.
Being a cheapskate and realizing that there are myriad other ways that a league can bleed fans for money, I took him up on his offer and ran down his list of options.
Sure, you can buy an antenna and watch whatever games happen to be on ABC that day for free, but Walt Disney Co.’s
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and Time Warner Inc.’s
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Turner Sports have made sure you’ll miss a whole lot of action that way.
Back in 2014, those companies — and their ABC, ESPN and TNT channels — agreed to a nine-year deal that pays the NBA $24 billion for the right to air its games. That’s $2.7 billion a year and roughly triple the $930 million those companies had been paying for those rights.
You could also shell out a few hundred bucks, buy a PlayStation 3 or 4 and watch games through the PlayStation Vue service, but that’ll only get you the ESPN and TNT games. However, the service costs $30 a month and you’ll still need an antenna for ABC games. There’s no way to access the few games that are on NBA TV — the league’s own cable and satellite channel.
Dish Network Corp.’s
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Sling TV, which streams live programming through Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Google Chromecast and other devices, will get you games on ABC, ESPN and TNT for $20 a month, not including a seven-day free trial.
The bottom line is you can cut the cord on the NBA playoffs and just about every other sporting event out there, but it’s always going to cost you something to watch postseason action, even without a cable or satellite subscription.
Consider that Time Warner’s Turner partnered with CBS Corp.
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in 2010 on a 14-year, $10.8 billion agreement to broadcast the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament and this year migrated Final Four broadcasts to its TBS cable network. While CBS and Turner’s TBS, TNT and TruTV networks are all available on SlingTV and some early games are available over the air on CBS, the days of seeing March Madness’ championship game on “free” television are over.
Then again, considering the money that Turner and Disney have invested in the broadcast rights for various sports, it’s in their best interest to keep as many playoff broadcasts on pay channels as possible.
In 2012, ESPN agreed pay Major League Baseball $700 million a year for eight years for both broadcast and digital rights to game broadcasts and for the right to broadcast one of four wild card game each year. Rival Turner, meanwhile, got its hands on national baseball broadcasts in 2014 and is paying $300 million each season for the next seven years in exchange for more playoff games.
As of 2013, even 21st Century Fox’s
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Fox Broadcasting — which is entering the third year of an eight-year deal that pays MLB $500 million a year for rights to regular season games, playoff games, the World Series and the All-Star Game — puts most of its MLB playoff games on Fox Sports 1 and Fox Sports 2 and reserves “free” Fox broadcasts for the World Series.
That hasn’t exactly done wonders for audience numbers, but Fox and its competitors have little choice but to get the most subscription fees for their money.
After Turner inked its deal with the NBA two years ago, it almost immediately laid off 10% of its workforce, citing declining ratings and a wealth of digital entertainment options.
Dizzying amount of money for rights to all kinds of sporting events
ESPN, meanwhile, laid off 300 staffers last year and parted with personalities like Keith Olbermann and Bill Simmons. Why? Partially because of the deals listed above and partially because it’s paying $1.9 billion a year through 2021 for National Football League broadcast rights that include Monday Night Football and a wild-card playoff game, $7.2 billion for exclusive rights to college football’s playoffs through 2026, $80 million a year through 2026 for the Rose Bowl alone and millions more in deals with college football’s Atlantic Coast Conference ($3.6 billion), Southeast Conference ($2.3 billion), Big 12 ($2.5 billion), PAC-12 ($3 billion) and Big 10 ($1 billion).
That doesn’t even include the $500 million ESPN paid to end NBC’s 43-year relationship with Wimbledon and broadcast all matches live for 12 years. Nor does it include the $75 million a year it will pay as part of a $600 million deal to share Major League Soccer and U.S. national soccer team broadcasts with Fox through 2026. It’s also on the hook for $826 million through 2025 to host tennis’ U.S. Open and tear it away from over-the-air CBS.
Throw in the French Open, the Australian Open, the Masters tournament, smaller college conference deals and deals with the NCAA, and ESPN is carrying some serious weight in rights fees.
You can cut the cord on the NBA playoffs and just about every other sporting event out there, but it’s always going to cost you something to watch postseason action, even without a cable or satellite subscription
Why is ESPN spending so feverishly? Because it’s in an arms race. Fox and its Fox Sports 1 and Fox Sports 2 networks paid $400 million wrest soccer’s World Cup from ESPN in 2018 and 2022 and joined NBC in taking Nascar away from ESPN in a 10-year, $8.2 billion deal. Fox also has struck deals with the NFL, MLB, Ultimate Fighting Championship, college football conference championships and with the PAC-12 and Big East conferences for their basketball championships —- and that doesn’t include the six-year, $1.5 billion deal its working on with the Big 10 conference.
It also seemingly wants to corner the global soccer market by acquiring rights to the German Bundesliga soccer league and exclusive rights to the UEFA Champions League.
This doesn’t include NBC Sports and its 10-year, $2 billion deal for National Hockey League games or the six-year, $1 billion deal completed last year for English Premier League soccer games. Nor the $7.75 billion that the folks at the Peacock network have paid to broadcast the Olympics through 2032.
Parent NBCUniversal (a unit of Comcast Corp.
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) is spending heavily for relatively little content, but sports networks are competing with not only myriad other cable and satellite options. Perhaps more importantly, they’re now besieged by Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Vimeo, social media and countless other forms of entertainment that sap away ratings and shift viewing habits.
There is a reason why every major sports broadcaster, save Turner, has a deal with the NFL — it’s just about the only entity that can guarantee huge audiences every year. In 2015, NFL games accounted for all of the top 25 television broadcasts and 46 of the top 50. One of those outliers was a Michigan State-Alabama football playoff game shown by ESPN.
When you consider that last year’s NBA finals averaged 19.94 million viewers on ABC — well within the 19 million to 22.5 million the NFL averages on network television — it’s little wonder that the networks with the rights to NBA playoff games want to wring as much out of them as they can.
While Disney can extract nominal retransmission fees from cable and satellite providers for ABC broadcasts, it gets roughly $6.60 a month from subscribers for just ESPN alone, according to SNL Kagan. The No. 2 most expensive cable network is TNT, which extracts $1.65 a month from each cable subscriber. Throw in an extra 30 cents for NBA TV, and the NBA playoffs could fetch almost $9 a month from cable subscribers if they left over-the-air television altogether.
There’s no indication that will happen, especially with NBA finals ratings reaching heights not seen since 1998 and Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls team.
However, as the media landscape fragments and networks lose more ground to digital competitors, expect their desperation shots to look more costly and ugly until the final horn sounds on sports television as we know it.
That makes cutting the cord and reducing costs the smartest play if you want to tune in to the NBA playoffs this year.
Also read: How not to miss out on ‘Game of Thrones’ premiere
Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Huffington Post and Esquire. Notte received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in 1998. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.
