Adam Silver expresses dissatisfaction with RSN model

Grading on the curve of major American sports commissioners, NBA commissioner Adam Silver certainly deserves credit for being a forward-thinker.

Silver’s league is more reliant on having a smaller but younger and more desirable (to advertisers) viewership to command major distribution rights fees. That makes recent cord-cutting trends troublesome, and while some younger people are still very much subscribing to “traditional” networks via digital distributors like YouTube TV, local NBA distribution across those non-traditional providers is very limited.

That’s especially true for anyone within the Sinclair/Diamond Sports footprint (like me, sadly.) That company’s approach was geared more towards launching Bally Sports Plus, an in-market streaming product that sounded great until they announced a $20/month price point.

Diamond Sports is currently in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings, too, as it aims to somehow shed a ton of debt while maintaining (or even adding) more in-market streaming rights with which to sustain itself as a business. It might work, it might not, but in any case Adam Silver sounds ready to move on to a new model.

Via John Ourand, here’s Silver offering his thoughts on the subject:

Adam Silver on the RSNs: "We need to reimagine these relationships."

Listen to the Marchand & Ourand Sports Media pod here:
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— John Ourand (@Ourand_Puck) April 22, 2023

“There’s no doubt that…we need to reimagine these relationships. There’s the specific issue in terms of Diamond with the debt they had and correcting that issue. Then in terms of the fundamentals of the business, everyone sees what’s happening in the television market. You’ve had a dramatic decline in the number of television homes. When you include the virtual distributors it’s not as low as many people think, there’s still 75 million homes receiving cable/satellite programming in the United States.”

From there, Silver notes that younger generations aren’t watching traditional television anymore, which is true. Whether or not the NBA’s current partners are well-positioned to pivot and take advantage of shifting viewing habits remains to be seen.

“It’s why Sinclair, now Diamond, was so focused on taking those same games and distributing them digitally, not just from a linear standpoint.”

Silver, though, clearly seems to at least have an understanding of the circumstances and factors in play, which should serve the league well. But if we can somehow get to a system where it’s easier and cheaper to actually watch the team you want to watch, that would be amazing.