NBA Commissioner Adam Silver on Friday looked to a future beyond the ongoing Nuggets broadcast impasse between Altitude and Comcast sports and said he thinks a larger “redesign” of how Denver fans and basketball fans more broadly consume games is in order.
After an NBA Cares ceremony at the Arthur E. Johnson Boys & Girls Club in Denver, Silver outlined what he thinks the league’s role can be — he said Thursday before Game 1 of the NBA Finals that solving the problem is “on us” — given it’s not directly involved in the conflict.
“We have an opportunity now to redesign how fans can receive games,” Silver said. “It’s clear to me that, where I’m saying it’s on us, the last thing we want to do is disenfranchise fans. Not that it should be any different, but particularly when you have a Finals-caliber team and we know that there’s intense interest in seeing these games. I’m very sympathetic to fans and I get a lot of emails and I’ve seen on social media and just comments while I’m here in town of people saying, ‘this makes absolutely no sense that I can’t watch games.’
“I think we have to own this issue.”
The question fans want answered, of course, is how long this remains an issue. It’s been at play for more than three years in Denver. Local Comcast customers have been unable to watch Avalanche and Nuggets games since 2019. Altitude first sued Comcast shortly after its carriage deal lapsed in September that year, accusing the cable giant of violating antitrust laws.
The parties settled in March, but Avalanche and Nuggets games remained blacked out in Colorado for the remainder of the 2022-23 seasons.
Silver called FuboTV and DirecTV’s deals with Altitude to carry games “incredibly helpful,” but fans in Denver remain unable to watch games on Comcast and Dish Network.
“The outside timeline is two more seasons, which is the length of time left on our national deal and a lot of our rights correspond with those two remaining years,” Silver said Friday. “It doesn’t mean that with cooperation from our existing partners that we can’t do something sooner, but that’s at least the outside timeline.”
Silver noted that, even as regional sports networks falter — Diamond Sports Group, which operates 19, filed for bankruptcy in March — interest in local NBA broadcasts has actually increased. Conventional cable viewership, though, has declined precipitously as streaming rates have accelerated.
The future of watching NBA games could include what Silver called a “hybrid” approach.
“Pretty much everybody has access to broadband or cell services,” he said. “So I think what we’re learning is that people consume media in very different ways and that if they can watch other forms of media on their phone or whatever device they have, they should be able to watch our games as well.”
That change in media consumption also means there’s less clear delineation between “national” games and local games, a shift Silver made sound as though it will be central to the league’s approach to new media rights.
“We don’t have control, right now, of the local rights of the Denver Nuggets, but what I was referring to is we sit in what is now a very different media paradigm from when this dispute began at the advent and the explosive growth of streaming services and I think the more rapid decline of conventional cable than people were predicting,” he said. “As we are trying to design what a new approach should be to see NBA games, the part that is on us is taking into account how a local fan is able to watch as well. As opposed to historically we’ve had local games and national games, to me, I think from a fan standpoint, they’re certainly not making those distinctions.
“The Denver Nuggets are a perfect example because they have a huge, broad fanbase that’s spread out nationally and globally for that matter and they want to watch Nuggets games. They don’t really think they should have to bother with blackouts or whatever, some commercial dispute that’s going on with a team and its distributor.”
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