Despite a looming battle between the NBA and TNT, its legacy media partner, Comcast believes it has a clear lane to the new rights deal, one that will bolster NBC’s primetime lineup for the next decade.
Comcast president Mike Cavanagh, speaking to investors during the cable giant’s second quarter earnings call on Tuesday, indicated that NBC does not expect to be greatly inconvenienced by Warner Bros. Discovery’s attempt to match Amazon’s bid for an all-streaming NBA package.
“Our expectation is that soon an 11-year rights deal between ourselves and the NBA will be announced,” Cavanagh said. “We don’t believe that the resolution of matching rights will affect the package that we expect to be awarded.”
NBC’s return to the NBA fold comes with a hefty price tag; at $2.5 billion per year, it is even pricier than the network’s Sunday Night Football package, for which it pays the NFL some $2 billion per season. In exchange for all that loot, NBC Sports will earn the rights to carry 100 NBA regular-season games per year across its broadcast flagship and Peacock through the 2035-36 season, with plans to air primetime games on Tuesday nights as well as non-NFL Sundays.
As part of the 11-year deal, NBC will also pick up first- and second-round playoff games and six conference finals series. It will also broadcast the NBA All-Star Game, long a TNT staple, while bolstering its lineup with 50 annual WNBA games starting in 2026.
Cavanagh said that once everything is (eventually) made official on the contractual front, the NBA deal effectively will give NBC a “year-round calendar for sports.” Not only does Comcast expect to help grow the league’s ratings by increasing its broadcast footprint—the Big Four networks now enjoy a reach advantage of around 14 million U.S. TV households compared to top-tier cablers like TNT and ESPN—but the reunion should help bolster NBC’s advertising revenues while drawing more subscribers to Peacock.
“We are uniquely able to drive strong value with the NBA in multiple ways,” Cavanagh said. “First, by growing ad sales, by selling NBA ad inventory package with the rest of our marquee programming. Second, by acquiring and monetizing subscribers, both on linear and Peacock, and third, by optimizing NBCUniversal programming investment across sports, entertainment and news.”
Cavanagh went on to say that the NBA would help draw a “broad, diverse and youthful audience” to the broadcast network, whose base has aged rapidly over the last decade. In keeping with TV’s ever-graying demographics, the median age of NBC’s primetime audience is now 64.9 years, which is considerably older than the median age for the U.S. population at large (38.5 years). Comcast hopes to leverage that younger NBA audience in order to develop “companion programming and marketing collaborations that tap into” the league’s pop culture bona fides.
“The NBA’s decision to partner with us is a testament to our breadth and reach, our operational excellence in sports and innovation, and our decades of experience to bring world class content to consumers, much like our long-standing relationships with the NFL and the Olympics,” Cavanagh said. “We look forward to putting the weight of our entire company behind our partnership with the NBA for decades to come.”
Peacock losses narrowed in the quarter to $348 million, down from a $651 million hit in the year-ago period. The streamer ended the three-month earnings period with 33 million paying customers, which marked a sequential loss of about 1 million subs, although pricing increases helped boost Peacock revenues to the $1 billion mark. That’s up from $820 million in the analogous period in 2023.
On the legacy pay-TV front, Comcast continued to shed subscribers, posting a net loss of 419,000 video customers.
All told, the company generated $29.7 billion in revenue in Q2, down 3% from the year-ago $30.5 billion. Adjusted EBIDTA was flat at $10.2 billion. Domestic ad sales dipped 2% to $1.99 billion, while distribution dollars grew 6% to $2.78 billion.
