NBA signs new TV deals and extends digital rights

By Gina Keating

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The National Basketball Association said on Wednesday it has reached eight-year agreements to let Walt Disney Co.'s ABC and ESPN television networks and Time Warner Inc.'s TNT broadcast league games through 2016.

The agreements, financial terms of which were not disclosed, also expand the networks' rights to distribute the games and highlights on a variety of emerging digital platforms, including cell phones and Web sites.

The deals, which extend current six-year contracts with the three networks that expired this year, keep nationally televised NBA games on ESPN on Wednesdays and Fridays, on TNT on Thursdays and on ABC on Sundays.

The NBA's network, NBA TV, will present 96 regular season games and up to nine playoff games.

In addition to telecasting up to 75 regular season and up to 29 playoff games, ESPN won rights to deliver live NBA content to its digital platforms, including ESPN.com, ESPN360.com and ESPN Mobile TV. It also will offer an enhanced package of international television rights for game and studio telecasts.

ABC will telecast a minimum of 15 regular-season games, plus best-of-seven finals games in prime-time

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TNT will telecast 52 regular season games and up to 52 playoff games. It also picked up rights to simulcast games on wireless, broadband and video-on-demand through TNT OverTime, and to use interactive online elements such as selected camera angles, statistics feeds, highlights and studio shows on digital platforms.

"What you are seeing is the movement of the rights to follow the fan and to enhance the fan experience for those who want to experience it all," George Bodenheimer, president of ESPN and ABC Sports and co-chairman of Disney Media Networks, said on a conference call with reporters.

Last fall, NBA Commissioner David Stern told the Reuters Media Summit in New York that the NBA was considering selling a stake in its digital assets, NBA.com and NBA TV, to a media company with digital expertise to grow those assets.

Stern said on Wednesday that although the NBA could have digitally distributed its own content, "we have learned from what our partners have done in the digital space."

"This is a Time Warner-Walt Disney-NBA vision of how future rights deals will be done, but I did believe we could sit down with our partners ... and they know what to ask for and who to ask," Stern said. "Given our relationship, we know when we should say no, but when we should say yes."

Stern also said last fall that he expected new deals with Disney and Time Warner to include a "healthy" increase above the current $4.6 billion terms. No financial terms of the new deals were disclosed, but Stern said the league is "getting more in this contract than in the previous agreements."