ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro was emphatic Thursday that his network would consider housing the NBA’s impending local streaming hub, after reading SBJ’s report this week that YouTube is already in substantive talks with the league.
“I had no idea that YouTube was speaking with the league about it,’’ Pitaro said at the CNBC Sport x Boardroom Game Plan Summit in New York. “We are super interested. Out of market, we’re doing great. We have the MLB.tv package out of market, we have the same with the NHL… We definitely want to replicate that model, and we’ve made our intentions very clear with every league, including the NBA, that we want to be a part of the solution here.”
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Tuesday that he expects the league’s centralized hub — a proposed local broadcast home for an aggregate of teams — to launch for the 2027-28 season. But it has been a slow evolving process for multiple reasons. One is that Silver does not want to undersell a platform he thinks is worth at least $1B and, secondly, the league is trying to drive up the hub’s value by enticing as many teams as possible to opt in.
“There’s an RSN, a local RSN problem that the entire industry is grappling with right now,” Pitaro said. “And we think with our reach -- I mentioned our ratings before but it’s not just linear ratings -- if you look at our digital reach, our ESPN app, for the last month I believe, if you look at our unique users for the month, we were equal to the next 12 sports apps combined. That’s the ESPN app. From my perspective, that’s nothing but valuable to the leagues, so as they’re looking to solve this problem, they should be looking -- of course economically -- but they should be looking for reach, which we can provide. And we’ll be very creative with the league.
“Again, back to my point, full circle, on taking friction out of the process for sports fans. We believe ESPN is the front door, we’re Switzerland, we’re the place of record. If I were a league or a team, I would want to maximize the value, the reach that ESPN provides. And the last thing I’ll say is, it does not have to be exclusive. We have never once said that we require exclusivity for local, in-market rights. We’re perfectly comfortable with doing something non-exclusive.”
The NBA’s 13 ex-Main Street Sports Group teams (the Hawks, Hornets, Cavaliers, Pistons, Pacers, Clippers, Grizzlies, Heat, Bucks, T’Wolves, Thunder, Magic and Spurs) are all doing one-year-deals for the 2026-27 season -- or one-year-escape clauses -- so they can be free to join the centralized hub the following season. Indications are that the four NBA RSN teams (the Celtics, Warriors, Sixers and Kings), as well as OTA teams such as the Jazz, Suns, Trail Blazers, Pelicans and Mavericks will presumbably opt in, as well.
Other teams such as the Nuggets, Bulls, Rockets and Wizards, Knicks, Nets and Lakers — who have their own streaming platforms or prohibitive rights fees — could always join on an exclusive or non-exclusive basis. The point is, the league, which is also starting its own in-house production business, could ideally have all 29 U.S franchises in the hub, making it more desirable to major streaming platforms.
If it can entice $1B or more for the package, it can then dole out rights fees to the teams, depending on the size of their markets. For a team like the Lakers, which has rights fees of $199M and $209M the next two seasons, the league would presumably have to pay them a bigger pie to join than a smaller market team.
So it matters how much a streaming service will pay for the platform. Amazon has been mentioned as a possibility, but it already has the out-of-market League Pass, which blacks out local broadcasts. On the other hand, the centralized local hub (although nothing is finalized) will likely be geofenced, in that fans will have to go there to find their local home broadcasts and won’t be able to watch other league games.
Industry sources said the NBA is intrigued by the thought of partnering with YouTube, impressed by what it has done with Sunday Ticket in the NFL. The relationships there are also strong, considering that Jen Chun, YouTube’s head of sports and live partnerships, formerly worked at the NBA and has ties to Bill Koenig, the league’s president of global content and media distribution.
In fact, Silver -- speaking at the same seminar Thursday -- brought up YouTube’s preeminent spot in the marketplace, saying, “Audiences are rapidly shifting to streaming services. I mean, the number one platform that people view program on -- programming now in the United States is actually YouTube. And believe it or not, the lines crossed last year. It’s not even YouTube on their phones. It’s YouTube on their televisions.”
But, from the beginning, Silver has always said ESPN would be a profound fit for the hub, as well, and was paying attention to Pitaro’s remarks on Thursday about the value of local sports television.
“In fact, if you measure it in terms of minutes of people watching a live game, a New York fan watching their game in town -- and this is true in just virtually every market -- will watch almost twice as long, twice as many minutes out of the 2.5-hour game than they will for somebody else’s game,” Silver said. “So the streaming services are paying a lot of attention to that. I heard Jimmy Pitaro was here earlier. He said ESPN wants to take a hard look at local games as well. So, my sense is, that’s where it’s going. I would love it to be in combination with local broadcast as well, because local broadcast still has that reach that some of the streaming services don’t have, although that’s changing too. But I feel really confident about it long term, because there’s just so much value in premium sports.”
More from Pitaro:
ON NFL RIGHTS: Pitaro dodged a question about the likelihood of ESPN signing a new rights deal with the NFL, saying only that their relationship is in a “great place.” But pressed on whether an increase in ESPN’s NFL rights payment would result in ESPN having a slimmer rights portfolio moving forward, he acknowledged there is “some give and take there.” Pitaro: “Everything we do is with discipline. We have a very sophisticated strategy team, a very sophisticated rights acquisitions team, we have a sophisticated model that we run every time we acquire rights -- and we’re not going to do a deal that is bad for business. We’ve walked away from many partnerships -- long-term, decades-long partnerships with leagues and conferences -- and oftentimes it’s been painful. But if we don’t think it’s going to be productive for our business, we’re not going to do it.”
ON MLB LABOR TALKS: Asked about contingency planning if part, or all, of MLB’s 2027 season is lost to a lockout, Pitaro projected optimism. “I think people on both sides recognize the momentum that the sport and the league has,” he said. “I don’t know, but I think that cooler heads will prevail and they’re going to get this done.” (Pitaro’s sister, Lara Wisch, is MLB’s EVP & General Counsel.)
ON THE WORLD CUP: Pitaro said he has been watching the World Cup religiously and praised Fox’s English-language coverage as “fantastic.” He also pre-empted a follow-up by saying “of course we’re [ESPN] interested,” in the competition’s domestic broadcast rights, which are up after this cycle.
ON NEW DISNEY CEO: Pitaro’s scouting report on new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro: “He’s very thoughtful. He’s very calm. He’s curious. He’s asking all the right questions. He’s a fast learner. He’s passionate about what we’re doing and he does see ESPN as a critical component of the Disney strategy.”
