The NHL is under no pressure to beat the NFL to the media rights negotiating table, league commissioner Gary Bettman said Wednesday.
In an interview with CNBC at the site of the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, Bettman said he does not “feel any time pressure” to reach new media rights deals before the NFL begins its widely expected — if at this point seemingly stalled — expedited negotiations. “The NFL is a great property, and we understand that it’s prominent in the media landscape,” Bettman told Julia Boorstin, “but interestingly enough, the last time we had to negotiate the current deals [in 2021], it was in the wake of what the NFL had done, and we managed to get triple what we were getting [previously].”
The commissioner struck a more nonchalant tone than in a previous interview this year with John Ourand of Puck, in which he indicated that the league was in ‘wait and see’ mode to gauge the impact the NFL would have on the marketplace. “The NFL has a large footprint,” he said then, “and in this environment, if they sneeze, we’ll probably get pneumonia.”
Since that interview, the NFL’s reported timeline of reaching new rights deals by the start of its next season would seem to have slowed considerably. None of the published reporting indicates that the NFL has begun talks with most of its partners.
During that Puck interview back in March, Bettman indicated that the timing of the league’s negotiations could be influenced by how the NFL chose to proceed. Asked this time around about a potential early renewal with ESPN, he said that if “we can strike a deal that makes sense for both of us, we’ll be ready to go at any time.”
The NHL is entering the sixth year of its media rights deals with Disney-owned ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery-owned TNT, the latter of which is poised to be absorbed by Paramount as part of a pending transaction. Echoing a sentiment from the Puck interview, Bettman expressed hope that TNT will end up under the Paramount umbrella, a circumstance that he said would present “another opportunity for us.”
Currently, the NHL is the only one of the major leagues without a streaming-exclusive partner. Asked if the league wants to be “on more streaming platforms versus traditional linear,” Bettman sidestepped entirely and said merely that the league wants “to be loved, and we want to make sure we have the maximum distribution for our fans, so that our fans can access the games they want to see.”
In the Puck interview, Bettman was more explicit in suggesting that the league could benefit from having additional partners — albeit not specifying streamers — saying that “the more places you are, the more visible you are.”
