NBA Rights Situation “Sucks Right Now” For Warner Bros. Discovery Staffers, Charles Barkley Says
deadline.comCharles Barkley, one of the mainstays of the long-venerated studio show Inside the NBA, says the current media rights situation “sucks right now” for Warner Bros.
Discovery staffers. About 200 jobs could be lost, Barkley said in an interview Wednesday on SiriusXM, if WBD loses out to NBCUniversal. (Listen to a clip below.) Sports Business Journal reported earlier Wednesday that a deal could be completed as soon as next week.
WBD’s Turner Sports, which has carried NBA games for nearly four decades, could potentially lose out to NBCUniversal. Disney/ESPN and Amazon have reportedly reached terms with the NBA in a configuration that would resemble the recent divvying up of NFL rights between streaming and linear.
Disney and NBCU are proposing to pay in the range of $2.5 billion to $2.8 billion on an average annual basis, with Amazon a notch lower, at a bit less than $2 billion.
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