One month into the new NBA media rights deal, viewership remains well above the same point last year.
NBA regular season games were averaging Nielsen-estimated 1.91 million viewers across NBCUniversal, ESPN and Amazon Prime Video through the first month of the season, a figure that includes Adobe Analytics for NBC games — up 30 percent from last year and the highest average for the first month of play since 2017.
Including NBA TV, that increase rises to 52 percent. NBA TV is airing fewer games this season, giving this season an advantage over past years.
Keep in mind that Nielsen in September shifted to a new “Big Data + Panel” metric that adds viewership from smart TVs, set-top boxes and select providers’ internal third-party data (including Amazon) to the traditional Nielsen panel. Neither that — nor Nielsen’s previous expansion of out-of-home viewing in February — would fully explain a year-over-year increase of such size, but those methodological changes will generally skew historical comparisons.
While the main takeaway of the NBA’s media rights deals was the size of the rights fee — about $7 billion annually, for an 11-year total of $77 billion — the deal was also notable because the league was able to increase its reach. There is now a weekly, season-long package of games on primetime broadcast television, a first for the league.
Typically, leagues have to sacrifice reach in order to maximize media rights revenue. Instead, the NBA was able to increase both — and games during the first month of play reached 60.27 million unique viewers, nearly doubling last year and the highest since 2010.
As for last week’s games, the third edition of NBC’s “Coast 2 Coast Tuesdays” — Celtics-Sixers in most markets and Nuggets-Kings on the West Coast — topped week four of the season with an average of 2.9 million across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics. (NBC is the only network whose streaming viewership is not tracked by Nielsen, and as such it issues a combined figure across the two measurement companies.)
On a Nielsen-only basis, the telecast was the most-watched of NBC’s three regionalized Tuesday night windows with a 1.3 rating and 2.24 million viewers. On the equivalent night last year, TNT drew a 1.2 and 2.14 million for Mavericks-Warriors and a 0.9 and 1.71 million for Knicks-Sixers. As might go without saying, it is simply not possible to provide an apples-to-apples comparison between a regionalized window on broadcast and a fully national doubleheader on cable.
Also hitting a high in week four was Amazon Prime Video, which averaged a 0.7 and 1.43 million for Warriors-Spurs last Friday night — up a tick and 40 percent respectively from Grizzlies-Warriors on ESPN last year (0.6, 1.03M). The Warriors’ narrow win was the most-watched NBA game of the week among adults 18-34 and 18-49, per Amazon.
ESPN the previous night drew a 0.8 and 1.46 million for Lakers-Thunder, preceded by a 0.7 and 1.31 million for Magic-Knicks. The late game, an Oklahoma City blowout, declined from last year’s 0.9 and 1.52 million for Grizzlies-Lakers. The early game increased from a lower-profile pairing of the Pelicans and Thunder last year (0.6, 1.08M).
