INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA – MAY 27: Jalen Brunson #11 of the New York Knicks huddles with his team during the fourth quarter against the Indiana Pacers in Game Four of the Eastern Conference Finals of the 2025 NBA Playoffs at Gainbridge Fieldhouse on May 27, 2025 in Indianapolis, Indiana. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and or using this photograph, User is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)
Getty Images
The collapse of the regional sports network model has spurred significant changes in local media rights.
Leagues like Major League Baseball have completely taken over production and distribution for select teams that have lost their RSN home. Other franchises have launched their own subscription streaming services for fans to watch local games. And still others have jumped back to the waiting arms of local broadcast TV.
These shifts are positives in the sense that they keep teams in front of local fans on TV. But for the leagues, Diamond Sports Group/Main Street Sports Group’s erosion this decade was illuminating.
Teams can’t be left without a local rights life raft, and the best way to ensure they won’t be is for leagues to simply own and distribute the rights themselves, and then create new revenue streams off of those.
That’s largely the plan for the NBA right now as it attempts to consolidate most of its local rights onto one streaming home in time for the 2027-28 season. However, as Sports Business Journal’s Tom Friend reported earlier this week, there’s still significant uncertainty around the details of that offering.
Current State Of Play
There is no question that the NBA will consolidate most local TV rights under one streaming roof. But whose roof? And how many teams’ local rights will actually live there?
SBJ’s sources say the first season could feature as many as 25 teams, with a chance to scale up to 29 with teams like the New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers having games appear with limited (or potentially no) exclusivity for the streaming hub.
The Toronto Raptors would not be part of the hub given its existing arrangement with Rogers Communications and its location as the only NBA team in Canada.
If the league were to expand soon, as has long been rumored, any new teams would conceivably have local rights folded in automatically as well, since there are no existing deals to work past.
The lack of clarity around the games and teams themselves (plus questions around exclusivity) are what holds up progress for now. But the price tag for a streaming hub with over 25 teams could climb above $1 billion, according to SBJ.
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – JUNE 4: Detail of the YouTube logo outside the YouTube Space studios in London, taken on June 4, 2019. (Photo by Olly Curtis/Future via Getty Images)
Future via Getty Images
Who’s In The Running?
Right now, YouTube is considered the favorite to land the streaming hub, which would be geo-fenced, so would not act as a substitute for NBA League Pass for fans that want to watch out-of-market games.
SBJ points out that DAZN is likely second in line given its growing ambitions in the United States directly centered around local sports. DAZN is already working with 10 different NBA teams to house local streaming this season – including the Knicks, who were long a holdout from any sort of centralized option given its own streaming endeavors through MSG.
YouTube does not currently have a large collection of sports rights, but does offer NFL Sunday Ticket, that leagues’ out-of-market subscription service. In that sense, YouTube already has experience with an aggregated hub, even if the NFL is out-of-market and far fewer games.
Consolidation, By Lack of Consolidation
Parking team rights under one roof is a smart way for the NBA to maximize those revenues and centralize local broadcast experiences in the same way League Pass has done for out-of-market games. However, unless a streaming hub agreement is met with one of its existing media partners (Amazon, Disney, NBCUniversal), consolidated local rights for the league is unlikely to consolidate anything for fans.
While the NBA is not the only sport to offer games across a variety of platforms and networks, critics of the league’s wide array of partners will only grow louder with another one added to the mix for local games.
Granted, audiences are already watching local games either via broadcast, their team’s current regional sports cable add-on, or separate streaming service.
But the idea of telling fans they may need YouTube or DAZN to watch their local team’s games, on top of NBA League Pass, Amazon Prime Video, Peacock and ESPN is enough to fuel numerous media outrage cycles. Even if built on a faulty premise that this is a “new” hardship of the streaming era.
No matter how much the move benefits the NBA and its teams financially, the consolidation will be seen as further fragmentation. Based on last season’s record TV audiences for the league, though, that may not deter basketball fans as much as assumed.