Yahoo Finance NBA Slams Warner Bros Discovery Suit Over TV Rights As “Without Merit”; Media Giant Accuses League Of “Direct Breach” In Awarding Games To Amazon – Update
(Updated with NBA statement) Just hours before the Opening Ceremony is set to kick off in Paris, David Zaslav wants to remind everyone that the Olympics are not the only game in town, as expected filing a lawsuit against the NBA over TV rights.
Not that the NBA seem that impressed
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“Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (“TBS”) and Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. (“WBD”) bring this action against the National Basketball Association (“NBA”) to enforce TBS’s contractual rights to distribute NBA games through the 2035-2036 season,” reads a heavily redacted suit filed Friday in New York state court by WBD and its Turner Sports subsidiary.
Seeking a court order to keep its NBA rights for the next decade off Prime Video while this all plays out, the move this morning by the Zaslav-led WBD comes two days after the league rejected the Burbank media giant’s reported $1.8 billion-per-year matching offer against Amazon. In quick response, WBD proclaimed: “We think they have grossly misinterpreted our contractual rights with respect to the 2025-26 season and beyond, and we will take appropriate action.”
Today, WBD took its shot. Click to read the WBD/TBS lawsuit against the NBA.
“The NBA … has refused to honor TBS’s Match,” said the 29-page jury trial seeking complaint. “Not only that, despite TBS’s clear match, the NBA has purported to grant the rights to Amazon in direct breach of the Agreement. Unless the NBA is ordered to specifically perform its obligations before the 2025-2026 season, TBS will lose the unique and valuable distribution rights that the Agreement (including the MRE) was designed to protect, as well as the many intangible and incalculable benefits that those rights bring to Plaintiffs’ business. Plaintiffs thus have no choice but to bring this action.”
Outside of the filing itself, TBS said in a statement to Deadline: “Given the NBA’s unjustified rejection of our matching of a third-party offer, we have taken legal action to enforce our rights. We strongly believe this is not just our contractual right, but also in the best interest of fans who want to keep watching our industry-leading NBA content with the choice and flexibility we offer them through our widely distributed WBD video-first distribution platforms – including TNT and Max.”
Not that the NBA seemed that impressed.
“Warner Bros. Discovery’s claims are without merit and our lawyers will address them,” league spokesperson Mike Bass told Deadline soon after the WBD suit dropped.
As a current NBA rightsholder through the end of the 2024-25 season, WBD had an exclusive window of talks but reportedly balked at the price. The NBA then went on to seal deals with the other incumbent, Disney-ESPN, as well as NBCUniversal and Amazon. The three packages are worth $77 billion over 11 years. When WBD asserted its rights to match Amazon’s offer, the league rejected it, prompting the media company to vow “appropriate action,” That action has now been taken.
With a long history and deep ties with the NBA, WBD is betting it can leverage that history for a favorable outcome, either a fourth package of games or financial compensation or both. In addition to carrying NBA games for nearly four decades, Turner has also been the production backbone of NBA TV and NBA.com, which led many industry observers to expect that they would have the inside track to stay in the action.
With more than $40 billion in debt and a stock price bumping along at barely more than $8 a share (a third of its value at the close of the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger in 2022), WBD is keen to avoid another major blow. Zaslav is a former attorney who started his career at a law firm, and he has proven to be a dogged negotiator. Barry Diller, asked Friday morning about the NBA situation, predicted Zaslav would be able to “muck it up enough to be able to settle.” He also predicted that WBD would come away with games, which it needs to be able to sustain the sports tier of Max as well as its stake in joint streaming venture Venu Sports.
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