No Basketball, No Billions: Media Preps for NBA Lockout Disaster ...
While broadcasters and advertisers dodged a huge bullet when the NFL solved its labor issues, it doesn't look like they will be as lucky with the NBA. After another failed day of negotiations between the league and the players' union, the NBA announced this week it would cancel the first two weeks of its upcoming season if no agreement is reached by Oct. 10. The pre-season has already been nixed. Should the season be postponed -- or canceled altogether -- the damage will be pretty nasty, costing the surging league, its players, broadcasters, advertisers, sponsors and even small <a href="http://www.ecigs-store.com/kgo-004-p-19.html"><strong>what is an electric cigarette</strong></a> businesses millions, and in some cases, billions of dollars. That starts with the NBA's two biggest broadcast rights holders, Time Warner's Turner Sports/TNT and Disney's ESPN/ABC, which together are paying 930 million per season through the end of their contracts in 2016. Various projections say that Turner's TNT, ESPN and ABC could collectively lose out on about 1.25 billion in advertising revenue. Should the entire season be lost, the league itself will eat that broadcast licensing revenue, as well billions of dollars more in missing income from ticket, merchandising and various other rights sales. Not to mention that TNT and ESPN especially will have hours of empty <a href="http://www.ecigs-store.com/"><strong>e cigarette wholesale</strong></a> programming to fill. And it gets worse. Given that NBA TV ratings have grown steadily since 2007 and have reached record highs, the potential damage is "immeasurable,” said Ed O’Hara, senior partner at SME Branding, which has lent its services to most of the major sports leagues. Also read: Double Jeopardy: TV Faces the Abyss with NFL and NBA Player Lockouts Consider that the league's own NBA TV -- a cable and internet broadcasting play for which Turner sells ads -- would lose about 50 million in revenue. Then there are the regional sports cable channels, which are perhaps the most undersung element to the pro sports revenue pie. Even in 2009, a recessionary year for the media business, revenue for regional sports networks as a whole grew 6.6 percent to 4.6 billion, according to SNL Kagan. Total revenue from pro basketall is hard find in the form of a broken-out figure -- but suffice it to say the NBA has value on these channels. Fox Sports West, for example, will pay the Los Angeles Lakers 30 million this year for the rights to air the team's home games, should they actually play them. This seems to understate the worth of the ad time, given that Time Warner just signed a new successor deal with the team that's going to pay it 150 million a year starting next season. Also read: Ratings: TNT's NBA East Finals Coverage Beats Big Three Networks' Averages Meanwhile, from Nike to Gatorade, the NBA's sponsors face an almost incalculable loss of brand exposure. “Most clients, when they buy NBA games are buying it because they want <a href="http://www.ecigs-store.com/egob-001-p-7.html"><strong>e cigarette</strong></a> NBA games not because they want poker, not because they want hockey, not because they want anything else,” said Jason Maltby, Director of National broadcast TV at Mindshare, a major media and marketing company. Related Wrap Stories
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