Warner Bros. Discovery notifies NBA it will match Amazon’s $1.8 billion offer to carry league games

New York (CNN) — Warner Bros. Discovery notified the NBA on Monday that it will pay roughly $1.8 billion per year to match an offer from Amazon to carry a package of the league’s games, setting up a last-second buzzer-beating attempt by TNT’s parent company to retain the broadcast rights to the games.

“We have reviewed the offers and matched one of them,” TNT Sports said in a statement. “Our matching paperwork was submitted to the league today. We look forward to the NBA executing our new contract.”

The announcement comes as the NBA moves to renew its contracts with media partners, agreeing to 11-year deals with Disney, NBC and Amazon Prime Video for a reported $76 billion. Those deals, which were approved by the NBA’s Board of Governors last week, notably did not include WBD, CNN’s parent company, which currently broadcasts the league’s games on the TNT network and Max streaming service.

The governors’ signoff on the deals started the clock on a five-day window for WBD, during which it could opt to match the league’s other offers. While NBC’s bid for the package currently held by WBD far surpassed the current price it pays to air the games, WBD executives have repeatedly underscored that the company retains the right to match other offers, including a new third slimmer package of games won by Amazon.

A person familiar with the matter confirmed WBD’s matching offer Monday was for Amazon’s bid, which includes regular season and playoff games.

“We’ve received WBD’s proposal and are in the process of reviewing it,” an NBA spokesperson said.

It’s unclear if the NBA will accept or reject WBD’s offer, which the league intended for a streaming partner. In recent weeks, WBD executives have suggested that if the NBA declines to accept its matching offer, it could bring a lawsuit.

The months of dealmaking and uncertainty has set off alarms both inside and out of WBD, raising the possibility of Turner Sports’ nearly four decades as an NBA partner and home to the beloved “Inside the NBA” show could come to an end.

In its statement Monday, TNT said its offer to match Amazon’s deal, “will allow fans to keep enjoying our unparalleled coverage, including the best live game productions in the industry and our iconic studio shows and talent, while building on our proven 40-year commitment for many more years.”

The high-profile deals, months in the making, represent a massive shakeup for the league and WBD, which has aggressively marketed the NBA as a cornerstone of its streaming platform, Max, to woo audiences away from competitors.

The first sign of an upending to the carriage rights came earlier this year when WBD’s exclusive negotiating window with the NBA expired in April without an agreement. That allowed other companies to vie for the coveted sports rights, considered by many to be the crown jewel in WBD’s sports portfolio.

As reports emerged that the league agreed to multi-billion dollar offers from other media companies, the fate of “Inside the NBA”  was thrown into question. In recent months, host Charles Barkley has publicly decried what he believed was WBD’s bungling of the NBA deal.

“These people I work with, they screwed this thing up, clearly; and we have zero idea what’s gonna happen,” Barkley said in May. “I don’t feel good, I’m not gonna lie — especially when they came out and said we bought college football. I was like, ‘Well damn, they could’ve used that money to buy the NBA.”

Barkley’s comments came after WBD inked a new five-year deal with Disney’s ESPN to air two first-round College Football Playoff games this season and two additional quarterfinal matchups beginning in 2026, adding to the company’s live sports offerings.

The showdown over the NBA rights comes as legacy media companies struggle to retain audiences, with viewers opting to leave cable bundles behind in favor of cheaper, on-demand content. As streaming services like Netflix have continued to attract and further carve up audiences, live sporting events have continuously proved impervious to declines in viewership felt across traditional television.

While WBD maintains the rights to the NCAA March Madness tournament, along with the MLB, NHL and NASCAR, the NBA remains crucial to the media conglomerate. The cable channel TNT has built a programming slate around the NBA games, most notably the highly rated “Inside the NBA” show featuring Barkley, Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal.

Asked last week about the fate of WBD’s broadcast rights, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told reporters, “I don’t know yet.”

“Much of it is outside my control,” he added. “We’ll see.”

The-CNN-Wire
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