Silver Says Free Highlights Are an Issue As NBA Begins $77B Deal

The NBA has faced criticism over its national broadcast schedule this upcoming season, the first under a new media-rights deal. 

While the league has added 75 more national games for the 2025–26 season, additional broadcast partners have made it more complicated—and expensive—for fans to watch all of the league’s national games. 

At a press conference following Wednesday’s NBA Board of Governors meeting, commissioner Adam Silver was asked how much he considers the high barrier to entry to watch games as it applies to the next generation of NBA fans.

Silver said that the league thinks “a lot about it.”

“We know we have mass appeal on a global basis. We’re literally reaching billions of people and we don’t want to disenfranchise people by working with partners that are creating price points that make it inaccessible to them,” Silver said in response to The New York Times. 

The Times published a guest essay by former ESPN writer Joon Lee in June entitled “$4,785. That’s How Much It Costs to Be a Sports Fan Now.” The story calculated the costs needed for fans to follow their favorite team—including subscriptions, merchandise, and tickets.

Silver said he views sports consumption differently because “most people can only consume so many games.” However, he also said that the league has to weigh its partnerships alongside the “ongoing issue” of fans consuming NBA content for free on social media platforms. He referred to basketball as a “highlights-based sport.”

“Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, you name it … there’s an enormous amount of content out there,” Silver said.

Silver’s comments are striking given the NBA’s embrace of social media as an avenue for fans to consume its content. The league achieved a record 124 billion views on social platforms in the 2024–25 season, up 67% from the previous year, according to Videocites. 

However, monetizing social media engagement is more complicated than linear television and streaming viewership. The league’s 11-year, $77 billion media deal, which starts this upcoming season, is worth about 2.6 times as much annually as its previous deal even as ratings have been stagnant, or even dipped slightly. 

The NBA will air national games through three domestic partners: ESPN, NBCUniversal, and Amazon Prime Video. Games will be on over-the-air networks through ABC and NBC, on cable TV via ESPN, and on streaming through Peacock and Prime Video. ESPN’s direct-to-consumer streaming product will also include games from that network.

The league’s first exclusively streamed games will start this season, including weekly games (Mondays on Peacock and Thursdays on Prime Video).