Warner Bros. Discovery Loses NBA Rights
By Movieguide® Contributor
Warner Bros. Discovery has lost the rights to the NBA, which “has reupped its agreements with Disney‘s ESPN as well as Amazon’s Prime Video and inked a brand new deal with NBCUniversal,” according to Deadline.
Warner Bros Discovery filed a lawsuit, stating that the NBA rejected them unjustly. The company faced a $9.1 billion impairment charge following the loss of the NBA. In addition to the loss, the company also took a “$11.2 billion hit in write-downs and charges last quarter.”
Yahoo reported, “Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) stock price fell as much as 12% in early trading on Thursday after the company reported disappointing second quarter earnings on Wednesday that missed expectations on both the top and bottom lines.”
Movieguide® previously reported on the situation in mid-July:
Amazon, ABC/ESPN and NBC have signed massive new media rights deals with the NBA, and Warner Bros. Discovery has five days to match or sue.
The next 11 seasons of the NBA will now be shown across ABC/ESPN, NBC and newcomer Amazon, as new deals were worked out with each respective network. Pending approval from the NBA board of governors, all the deals will then be sent to Warner Bros. Discovery. WBD has five days to match any offers or potentially sue.
WBD CEO David Zaslov has remained positive, believing that the company will see subscriber growth in the second half of the year.
“We’re in litigation. At this point, we have handed it off to our lawyers. We have confidence in our position,” he said of the company’s current position. “The judge will decide whether our matching right, which is 11 pages long, represents an offer where we matched or not. We’ll see. But we’re getting back to work. The lawyers will handle this, and the judge will decide and off we’ll go.”
He continued, “This is what we do for a living. “We’re in 200 countries. Aside from the excitement and drive that we have around Max and our studio business and being the biggest maker of TV content and our library business, we have free-to-air and cable channels all over the world and those channels are B-to-B businesses and have carriage agreements. We’ve been in that business for 40 years. We’ve been very effective in that business and it’s our job, whether it’s a food channel or an entertainment channel or a sports channel, to make sure we have a very robust offering of content that nourishes and excites an audience.”
He said WBD has managed to secure “meaningful increases for our content.” Even without the NBA, he said, “We are the leader or one of the leaders in sports globally.”
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