Local NBA viewers by 9%, while the teams are fighting with a large market

A complete picture of the local viewing situation of the NBA is focused on.

After John Ourand von Puck reported at the beginning of this month that the local NBA viewers sank by 13% last season (with data from only 25 of the 30 teams in the league), Tom Friend of Sports Business Journal reports that the decline in NBA was only 9% of the league. Based on Nielsen data, this number probably excludes the Toronto Raptors, which are not measured by Nielsen.

According to Freund, eight teams recorded the top 5 the Cleveland Cavaliers, Portland Trail Blazer, Boston Celtics, Houston Rockets and Detroit Pistons. The lower five included the Philadelphia 76ers, Chicago Bulls, Phoenix Suns, Utah Jazz and Miami Heat.

In team-for-team base, the local distribution can have a significant impact on the figures of the year over the year. For example, the Trail Blazers switched from very limited distribution in root sports to an over-air offer last season, in which the games were made accessible with an antenna. As a result, the team increased the audience by 109%, although he only won 36 games.

On the whole, the decline in the local viewership of the league was based on the performance of wholesale teams. Chicago and Philadelphia, two of the country's five largest media markets, have subjected and missed the playoffs this season. They recorded a decrease of 58% or 41%. The bulls were particularly enlarged by their lack of distribution in Comcast's cable systems, the largest pay TV provider in the region.

“Local reviews have been driven very strongly, from which teams the expectations have exceeded this year and all the occasional fans came in to join the journey,” Gregg Liebman, head of Research at Playfly Sports, told SBJ.

Teams that won the number of spectators mostly came from smaller markets such as Cleveland and Portland, which was not enough to compensate for the losses in the large markets.

“So if you have teams like the cavaliers, pistons, thunder and the rockets, the teams that have exceeded expectations with great degrees – these are smaller market teams,” continued Liebman. “And if you have some of the larger market teams such as Philadelphia and Chicago and Dallas, in which the fans have a certain expectation into the year and have interrupted them, you can see that they see a little exit. “

The rescue for the local NBA viewers this season was streaming, in which a bump of 30% was based on a sample of a third of the league compared to the previous year. And the spectators who have chosen streaming services stayed longer than on traditional television by about 30 minutes.

Please enable JavaScript to display the survey operated by Disqus.

This shift is a symbol of the entire media strategy of the league in the future.

“At the moment it is the standard that everyone [national] The game is linear and some of these games are in streaming simulcast, ”said NBA EVP of the media distribution Scott Kaufman-Ross to SBJ.

These next few years will be a volatile time for the NBA when it comes to local programs. In view of the distribution of linear television for many teams and the teams still in its infancy in their infancy in their infancy, it is difficult to predict what the spectator landscape will look like in five years. It is particularly difficult to recognize that team performance is also a key factor.

With the NBA like MLB, it may be a clever decision for the league. If this is the case, linear television numbers must continue their decline.