Stern Staying Course Amid NBA Ratings Dip

NBA commissioner David Stern remains upbeat about the league's future on TV, despite regular-season ratings that fell 7 percent on ESPN and TNT and 4 percent on ABC, and NBA Finals ratings that sank by more than 30 percent on ABC. In fact, Stern expects the NBA to get an increase over the $400 million a year it currently receives from ABC/ ESPN and the $366 million it gets from Turner three years from now, when the next TV-rights deal takes effect. "It is our intention and hope to be in business with the Walt Disney Co. and Time Warner for the foreseeable future—well, well beyond the current TV-rights agreement," he said. Some continue to question if the NBA made the right call three years ago, when, under the new TV-rights agreement, it moved more games from broadcast to cable. The ratings declines, even on cable, seem to support such skepticism. But Stern has no time for such notions. "Broadcast ratings [in general] continue to go down, while cable ratings continue to grow," he said. He added that the rights deals with his cable partners will evolve into much more than TV exposure—alluding to wireless, broadband, video on demand and other vehicles with which rights holders can cover their broadcast fees going forward. Even before the current rights deals end in 2008, Stern said the league is looking at ways to drive traffic to Disney theme parks, such as moving the NBA Draft camps there. Such moves will also expose the NBA to children and their families in hopes of bringing in more TV viewers. While acknowledging softer Finals ratings, Stern said the NBA "still has an important value for prime-time [broadcast] television," noting that each of the seven telecasts this year was the top program of the night among adults 18-49 and men 18-49. And while ratings on TNT and ESPN were down this season, he pointed out that ratings over the first three seasons of the current TV-rights deal are up 5 percent on TNT and 2 percent on ESPN. "History," Stern said, "will be the judge" of whether moving more games to cable was the right idea. But he pointed to the NFL's decision to move Monday Night Football from cable after next season as justification for his own move three years ago. "Moving Monday Night Football to cable broke the dam," Stern said of the reluctance to offer big sporting events on cable. Media buyers, though, are still cautious about Stern's enthusiasm over cable. "He was able to get the money he wanted by moving to cable, which can afford to pay higher rights fees because of their subscriber fees. He kept the league financially viable," said Ray Warren, president of Carat Media Group Americas. "But we are disappointed with the lower ratings. We still like to reach the casual fan who may not have followed the game to cable." Sam Sussman, media director at Starcom, agreed that reaching the most people is the goal of most sports advertisers but said the NBA reaches a different audience than Nascar, making it desirable, even if it reaches fewer people per telecast. "Nascar may be growing its national audience, but it still does not deliver large numbers in New York and Los Angeles," he said. "The NBA still can deliver a young, multicultural, urban-market audience that a lot of advertisers want."

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Stern Staying Course Amid NBA Ratings Dip

John Consoli

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