A cross-conference collision between the Indianapolis Colts and Minnesota Vikings rarely lends itself to anything worth characterizing as a “rivalry,” but Sunday night’s meeting still managed to draw a crowd on NBC. According to Nielsen, 16.18 million viewers tuned in to the flagship broadcast, where the purple team prevailed by a score of 21-13.
While the game wasn’t terribly compelling, at least by NFL standards—led by 39-year-old QB Joe Flacco, the Colts’ offense only managed to convert on three of their 11 third-down situations and failed to book a single trip to the red zone—NBC’s deliveries still dwarfed the primetime competition. Flexed in after the previously scheduled Jaguars-Eagles outing was demoted to a 4:20 p.m. ET kickoff, the Vikings’ win came up shy of Sunday Night Football’s per-game average of 19.38 million linear-TV viewers, but even a middling NFL outing can make everything else on the tube look sick by comparison.
If a struggle between second-tier markets drew a somewhat less massive audience than NBC usually scares up on Sundays, the ratings were still downright enviable. Bear in mind that a sloppy Week 9 game that saw Sam Darnold turn the ball over three times (two picks and a strip sack that Indy ran back for six points) easily out-delivered the deciding frame of this summer’s NBA Finals. ABC’s coverage of the Celtics’ 106-88 clincher over the Mavericks averaged 12.22 million viewers on June 17, or 3.96 million impressions shy of our very forgettable midseason NFL game.
Of course, when there’s a more engaging matchup on tap, Sunday Night Football all but buries the NBA’s championship turnout. The Sept. 5 Ravens-Chiefs opener averaged 25.56 million TV viewers, or 29.16 million when streaming impressions are tossed into the TV mix, and the recent Cowboys-49ers broadcast served up another 24 million NBC + Peacock viewers. That’s about double what ABC hauled in for Game 5 of the NBA Finals. It’s the NFL’s world; the rest of us just live in it.
While we’re throwing numbers around, here are two more figures that are worthy of a little scrutiny. A couple of years ago, when NBC re-upped its rights deal with the NFL, parent company Comcast agreed to pay the league some $2.05 billion per year for the privilege. Fast-forward to NBC’s blockbuster renewal of its long-abandoned covenant with the NBA—a deal that will find Comcast forking over $2.45 billion to Adam Silver & Co. each year—and suddenly the discrepancy hits like a cartoon anvil falling from a great height. On an annualized basis, the cable giant is paying approximately $400 million more for its NBA contract than it is for its NFL deal.
Two questions that immediately come to mind when confronted with the particulars of Comcast’s sports-rights calculus: a) “Huh?” and b) “Why?” Setting aside the first one, which is really just a marker for perplexity, the people equivalent of a dog barking at something in a pile of leaves, let’s instead tackle the interrogative. Why is Kabletown spending more money on its NBA deal when the NFL is clearly the standard against which all U.S. sports properties are measured? And while we’re at it, why is NBC so eager to get back into the entrepreneurial saddle with a league that appears to be slowly succumbing to the entropic forces of late-stage cord-cutting?
Before we get into the whys and wherefores, it’s probably worth noting that Comcast isn’t the only corporate titan with an NFL-grade NBA budget. Disney, which maintains the most expansive sports portfolio known to civilized man, will pay around $2.6 billion per year under its new deal with the Association, which is “only” about $100 million south of its regular NFL payment. The difference between the two is probably less than what Jimmy Pitaro spends on Graig Nettles memorabilia.
Comcast president Mike Cavanagh over the summer explained why the company was so eager to buy its way back into the good graces of the NBA. Speaking on a July earnings call, Cavanagh talked up the NBA’s pop-culture bona fides, noting that pro hoops “brings in a broad, diverse and youthful audience that is culturally relevant.” Aside from the demographic advantages, the nine-month basketball season effectively maximizes the NBC Sports calendar, which is to say that in a time when the audience for primetime entertainment offerings can no longer sustain a broadcast network, the now-seamless expanse of live college and pro sports will help max ad sales revenues while allowing for significant increases on the distribution front.
Cavanagh also said that the NBA will function as a key acquisition tool for Peacock, which closed out the third quarter with 36 million subscribers. While that’s a respectable figure, it still falls well behind the reach of more established juggernauts like Disney+, which boasts some 153.8 million global customers, and the untouchable first mover that is Netflix (282.7 million subs). Roughly half of NBC Sports’ 100 regular-season games will stream on Peacock, with the rest of the slate finding placement on NBC’s Sunday and Tuesday night lineups.
As Donna Langley, chairman and chief content officer of NBCUniversal Studio Group said at a recent industry event, the NBA’s audience composition is considerably different than the weekly NFL crowd, and as such, basketball should “open up a whole new opportunity … to invite new audience members in.”
With a median age in the low-40s, the NBA TV audience is about 20 years younger than the people who watch NBC’s primetime entertainment lineup (64.9 years); along with the higher ratings furnished by the league, the youth movement should also translate to a surge of business from marketers who want to connect with more demographically apposite consumers without having to pay the nosebleed NFL rates. (Per media buyers, NBC’s going rate for a single 30-second unit on Sunday Night Football is now hovering at around the $1 million mark.)
The NBA is also a means to attract a cohort that has largely divorced itself from the televisual mainstream. Season-to-date, only 13.9% of the people who watch primetime entertainment programming on the Big Four networks are members of the 18-49 demo, whereas 45% of a typical NBA TV audience are adults under 50.
Synergies and youth movements aside, the value of the NBA rights packages is largely predicated on accumulated reach. Unlike football, which enjoys a sort of eventfulness that’s born of relative scarcity, NBA games are plentiful. Regular-season outings last season averaged around 1.6 million viewers per game across the Disney and WBD nets, or less than one-tenth of the NFL’s supersized deliveries (17.9 million per window)—but with multiple hoops outings scheduled across each week, the gross ratings points begin to add up fairly quickly.
Over the course of the season, an NBA media partner can piece together as many impressions as it can with a slate of 20 NFL windows, and as the eyeballs amass, the advertising and affiliate dollars pile up accordingly. Unlike the NFL, which provides an immediate fix—on a per-game basis, the league’s media partners average well over $40 million in ad revenue per each national broadcast—the NBA is a slower build. But given the sheer amount of inventory that’s in play during basketball’s nine-month campaign, a media partnership with the NBA is a license to print money.
And as that money becomes increasingly harder to pin down in primetime—adjusting for inflation, the average unit cost of a 30-second spot on a scripted or reality/competition series has plummeted nearly 62% in the last decade alone, while Sunday Night Football’s rates have all but doubled over the same time frame—marketers are going to continue to chase after the NBA’s younger, more affluent audience. To the untrained eye the media math may look a little funny, but there’s nothing fishy about those new NBA contracts.
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