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After months of speculation, the NBA on Wednesday finally officially announced its partners for its new media-rights package: ESPN, NBCUniversal, and Amazon. The NBA rejected a competing bid for Amazon’s “C” package from Warner Bros. Discovery, which looks poised to take legal action in response, but for now, WBD will be on the sidelines come 2025.
As part of the NBA rights announcement, the WNBA rights are also now official. As had been reported last week, the new WNBA deal is worth $2.2 billion over the same period with the same three partners: ESPN parent company Disney, NBCUniversal, and Amazon.
However, unlike with the NBA deal, ESPN will not have exclusive rights to the WNBA Finals.
ESPN has aired the WNBA Finals exclusively on its networks since 2003, and it has aired at least one WNBA Finals game each season dating back to 1998, the league’s second season. In this new rights package, ESPN will broadcast just five WNBA Finals over 11 years, while NBC and Amazon each take three years apiece. (The new deal brings WNBA games back to NBC for the first time since 2002.)
ESPN has lately appeared more open to sharing broadcasting rights it once had exclusivity over. In May, the network announced it will sublicense a portion of the expanded College Football Playoff to TNT, a first in the CFP era. TNT is reportedly paying ESPN somewhere in the nine-figure range for the CFP games.
Last month, ESPN content president Burke Magnus alluded to the idea that his network was open to sharing the WNBA Finals with other partners.
“Of course we want the WNBA Finals,” Magnus told Richard Deitsch of The Athletic. “I’m sure that, at some level, that’s going to be a component of the deal. But if we don’t have it every single year, because it means it’s on other networks, I think that’s actually a good thing I’m imagining for the ultimate development and continued growth of the league.”
The First Exclusively Streamed Finals
While it’s not yet clear exactly how the WNBA’s broadcast partners will divide the Finals, Amazon receiving three years of rights means there will be a WNBA Finals series aired exclusively via streaming. This marks the first time that a streaming giant has secured the exclusive rights to a Finals series of any major U.S. professional sports league.
Streaming-only live games have been picking up steam over the past few years—particularly after Amazon began streaming Thursday Night Football on Prime Video in 2022. In January, Peacock streamed the first exclusively streamed NFL playoff game, while Netflix is set to stream the NFL’s two-game Christmas slate this year.
But Amazon isn’t new to showcasing high-level WNBA games. The final round of the Commissioner’s Cup, the WNBA’s regular-season tournament, has aired on Prime Video since the tournament’s inception in 2021.
