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Season brings a flood of live local streaming from NBA teams

Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but live local streaming is about to take off in the NBA this season.

With NHL and Major League Baseball still negotiating these local digital rights, more than 20 of the NBA’s 30 teams will have live streams of their games available in market to authenticated users this season.

National networks, like ESPN and TNT, have had the right to live stream their games for several years. But things have moved much more slowly locally, with networks and leagues disagreeing on how to value those rights. The leagues control the local streaming rights and view them as a potential new revenue stream; Fox Sports Net and NBC Sports Regional Networks have been reluctant to pay extra for these rights, especially when they don’t know how often people will use it.

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Fox Sports Net and the NBA broke through that logjam last year by signing a three-year deal that saw FSN launch streaming services to a handful of distributors. This season, Fox Sports Net will build off that limited rollout by live streaming games locally for 16 of the 17 NBA teams to which it holds rights. The lone question mark is with the Brooklyn Nets, which may not be ready because of certain contract language in YES Network’s affiliate deals.

Fox’s rollout still will be limited, as three of the country’s top distributors — Comcast, DirecTV and Dish Network — do not have deals to carry the service and are not likely to have any in place this season.

Still, Fox has signed or is close to signing TV Everywhere deals with six of the country’s top nine distributors.

Local streaming

Where are the other leagues on local streaming deals? Fox Sports’ Clark Pierce says MLB is closer than the NHL, which is not likely to stream games again this season.

Pierce on MLB …

 “We’ve had some real encouraging conversations recently. I think we’re headed in a really good direction. Things look pretty good for next year, but clearly we don’t have a deal done yet.”

Pierce on the NHL …

“Discussions continue, but the season starts this week. It doesn’t look like we’ll have NHL streaming rights this season.”


Meanwhile, Comcast is close to its own local live-streaming deal with the NBA and expects to have local streaming services running with most of its eight teams, sources said. The biggest question marks are in Houston, where CSN Houston has filed for bankruptcy, and Portland, where the Blazers produce their own live stream service.

Sources said Comcast will make live local streams available to Comcast subscribers, plus AT&T and Verizon users. It does not have deals in place with DirecTV, Dish Network or other cable operators.

An NBC Sports Regional Networks spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

By the middle of last season, Fox Sports Net started live streaming games to a small number of subscribers. Because the rollout was so limited — only AT&T, Suddenlink and Wow signed to carry the service — Fox didn’t learn a lot from usage patterns. Similar to linear TV, more people streamed the local games involving good teams rather than games involving bad teams.

But Clark Pierce, Fox Sports senior vice president of mobile and advanced platforms, said Fox’s focus last year was not on figuring out usage patterns. Rather, Fox focused on the technical aspects of providing live streams locally.

“Last year, we pushed really hard to get it going,” Pierce said. “Usage was about where we thought it would be. But our focus wasn’t on usage. It was on reps. We had to make sure we had the technology in place.”

The biggest operator set to take on the service is Time Warner Cable, which is on schedule to stream games at the start of the season and will provide local services to fans of the Cavs, Clippers, Hornets, Spurs and Mavs, as Time Warner Cable is the dominant cable operator in those markets.

Charter, Cox and Cablevision completed deals with Fox and should have access to in-market streams by the middle of this season. A Verizon deal is expected to come in the next few weeks, with that rollout also expected in the middle of the season.

Staff writer John Lombardo contributed to this report.

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