“We recognize that, in some ways, the decline of cable has disproportionately impacted the NBA,” Silver told Kendall Baker of Yahoo Sports AM. “Our young audience isn’t subscribing to cable, and those fans aren’t finding our games.
But there are still roughly 65 million homes in America that are consuming sports in a very traditional way, and even more people on network TV. Is that declining? Yes. Is that going away anytime soon? I don’t believe so. So we want to be on all of those platforms.”
This is going to age me but as a kid I watched all of my teams games on the local public broadcast using an antenna. My parents wouldn’t pay for cable. That is how I became a fan of my home team and basketball. Without free access, the NBA would have been as alien as water polo. The decision to put all the content on cable is going to cost the NBA fans who would grow up and buy tickets etc. This started in the 90s with content migrating behind paywalls but now there is so much good content that doesn’t require cable that we aren’t just going to pay for cable, especially since the product is not as entertaining.
The free antenna years are never coming back, but it’s not worth subscribing to cable just for live sports and news. The cable providers have been ripping people off for years and playing all kinds of games with billing. The NBA needs to get on a lower cost streaming service or lose fans.
Yeah, I watched all Celtics away games on TV38 using an antenna. I couldn’t watch the home games because they were on cable, so I had to listen to them. I would have been a fan either way, but I had to get creative back then. Definitely videotaped a game if I was going to miss it.
I used to have League Pass, but it’s just not worth it for the Celtics. Like half of their games aren’t on there.
they need to stream on twitch