Warner Bros. Discovery followed through on its threat to “take appropriate action” against the NBA for rejecting its broadcasting rights offer. On Friday, the media company sued the league after the NBA turned down its bid to match Amazon’s streaming package.
  • @[email protected]
    1•1 month ago

    I feel like matching clauses should absolutely inherently obligate the league to accept a matching offer and they shouldn’t be able to pull stuff like “we think Amazon is a better partner” or whatever.

    I think the weakest real point for TNT matching is the fact that Amazon is paying for several years up front. That’s a distinct, meaningfully valuable element, and if TNT can’t do it, saying they couldn’t match is legit.

  • @pdxfed
    1•1 month ago

    More than anything the fragmentation mentioned at the end of the article, games spread out over all different channels and services means if you aren’t streaming illegally you’ll have to spin a roulette wheel (or pay 5 different masters) to find out if you have coverage for a given game on a given night. Getting to streaming but fragmenting coverage so much loses all the benefits of finally jumping away from “market coverage restrictions” that traditional TV users would have been used to. Internet streamers have 11 more years where it still doesn’t make sense to pay for something.