NBA aims for jump in fees by luring streamers, WSJ reports

The NBA’s biggest partners, Disney’s (DIS) ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) TNT together pay about $2.6B a year for media rights, but aren’t looking to agree to big spending increases and are exploring signing up for smaller packages, people familiar with the situation told The Wall Street Journal’s Amol Sharma and Isabella Simonetti. With an exclusive negotiation period set to expire in April, those companies already are in renewal talks with the NBA, but if ESPN and TNT buy fewer games, that would allow the league to create a package for a streaming video player and both Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL) have expressed interest and are looking for much more than a small slice of NBA games, the report added. Other companies in the sports media landscape include Comcast (CMCSA) and Google’s (GOOGL) YouTube.