The NBA said that team franchises can "continue to increase in value" as the U.S. league expects to score multi-billion-dollar global digital rights deals, "even as viewers drift away from watching sport on television," according to Murad Ahmed of the FINANCIAL TIMES. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver on Wednesday said that he was “bullish” the sport would continue to draw the commercial revenues required to "justify the huge sums spent on acquiring teams in recent times." In '14, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer paid $2B to acquire the L.A. Clippers. Speaking in London to promote the league’s latest int'l "foray," a regular season game between the Indiana Pacers and the Denver Nuggets, Silver said, "We will continue to see $2 billion spent in the NBA. From a relative standpoint, the value of premium sports content is becoming that much more valuable compared to other types of entertainment. It’s the closest thing to a sure thing ... compared to the amount of investment it takes to create a hit show." Silver added that he was "exploring deals with technology groups, as basketball began to look beyond television for future revenues." In the U.S., digital sports deals have been "relatively small compared to those for television." Last April, Twitter reportedly paid a "mere" $10M to live stream 10 Thursday night NFL games. But larger online deals "have been struck elsewhere in the world." Last year, the NBA "signed a five-year extension to its internet streaming deal with Tencent," the Chinese web group, worth a reported $700M. Silver: "Digital media companies are by definition global and there is an opportunity to do deals with them in 200 countries around the world where basketball is followed" (FT, 1/11).
