The NBA's New $76 Billion Dollar TV Deal Highlights What Makes Watching Sports So Annoying In 2024

David Dow. Getty Images.

A few weeks ago it was leaked that the NBA was on the verge of a massive 11 year/76B TV media rights deal which is great news if you're interested in your favorite team now having more money to spend on their roster and bad news if you're someone who enjoys Inside The NBA.

Well now that agreement is official

and it's time to start the clock on TNT's desire/ability to match one of these offers and keep Inside The NBA in our lives 

The deals, which set NBA records for both length and total value, go into effect for the 2025-26 season. Games will continue being aired on ESPN and ABC, and now some will be going to NBC and Amazon Prime. TNT Sports, which has been part of the league's broadcasting family since the 1980s, could be on its way out but has five days to match one of the deals.

The five-day clock would begin once the league sends the finished contracts to TNT.

TNT Sports currently is paying $1.4 billion per season. Considering the amounts of the three packages, that would make the Prime Video rights the ones it would be likely to try to match.

Obviously, like everyone else, I can't imagine a world where we have an NBA season and don't have the Inside The NBA crew involved. Nobody wants to live in that world, yet it certainly feels like we're headed that way.

I've blogged enough about that aspect of this deal and how much it stinks out loud, so today I want to focus on something else that sort of grinds my gears. This schedule

Now, I'm in the demo of basketball fans that are already watching NBA basketball 7 days a week from October to June, no matter the matchup. I'm not exactly the type of fan the NBA is trying to market/appeal to. They already have me hooked. So is it cool that there will be nationally televised games 7 days a week? I guess? 

My issue is mainly around how this impacts my everyday normal life, and this isn't only an NBA issue, this is an every sports issue that I feel like we as a society need to figure out. It's pretty obvious that the future of TV/professional sports is streaming whether it's Peacock, Amazon, whatever. While the broadcasts themselves are fine (I actually don't have the Amazon picture/production), this new form of consuming games provides a problem that I find extremely annoying.

While these games will be happening on Peacock/Amazon etc, I imagine it will come at a time when the rest of the NBA slate is happening on regular TV/League pass. Well, I have zero interest in having to change my apps and reload things every time a game on Amazon goes to commercial. It's one of the reasons I never really watched the NFL games on Amazon. Half of the fun during the NBA season when there are 11 games on at once is being able to seamlessly go from game to game whenever there's a break, use multi-view (if you have YouTubeTV) etc. Maybe the younger generation doesn't care about this stuff, but I find it extremely annoying. I suppose you may say the easy answer here is having multiple TVs or watch the streaming game on a laptop etc, but screw that. All I want is to easily change the channel and watch sports when something goes to a commercial.

If that makes me an old, so be it. 

To me, there's a simple solution to this issue. Well at least to my brain it's simple, don't ask me about the tech side. There should be a way to link all of these streaming services to your current TV provider. For example, I fire up YoutTubeTV and there's a Peacock/Amazon/Netflix channel. In order to unlock it, you have to sign in with your account. Once you're in, it shows up for the pro sports, exactly like League Pass or Sunday Ticket. On those days there are NBA games streaming on Peacock, the Peacock NBA channel is active on YouTubeTV, which makes it easy to flip between games all within the same app.

I'm not going to lie, I feel like this is a no brainer. Whether it's Thursday Night Football or one of these NBA games, you can click on the Amazon Sports channel.

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Of course, there are obvious reasons these companies wouldn't want to do this I imagine. They care about getting you on their app, tracking your info/data, and getting your eyeballs into their system so maybe you watch other things. I get all that. I'm not saying get rid of Peacock/Amazon/Netflix, I'm just saying do what League Pass/Sunday Ticket does and allow fans to use our normal TV platforms to still consume your product.

And let's be honest. The harder you make it for consumers to watch your product, the more people are going to simply go the illegal stream route. Hell, that's already happening even before this deal kicks in, and if fans are now going to have to open/close/switch between all these apps just to watch regular season basketball, they're going to just streameast it and use a chromecast to project it on their TVs or something.