Premium TV Series, Premium Movies and Premium Sports starting at $20.00 per month. Well, at least that’s the running theory. Here is my guess. Max will never actually charge $9.99 for the addition of sports, any more than it will charge extra for CNN. Why? Because sports is a season away from looking very different on MAX and TNT.
TNT is expected to lose the rights to NBA basketball after the 2024-2025 season. After 40 years of the NBA on TNT the current owners of the cable network Warner Bros Discovery look ready to walk away from the NBA package that has netted it multiple Emmy’s and millions of viewers a year.
There is no weekly premium sport coming to take its place either. Yes TNT and TBS have some MLB games, but so do a number of competitors including free over-the-air stations and now even The Roku Channel. TNT has NHL hockey, but during the entire regular season ESPN+ is the home of every out-of-market NHL game, and the in-market games are typically found on Regional Sports Networks available through a few select streaming services and traditional pay TV offerings. Does anybody expect a smattering of soccer and combat sports to help MAX stand out? They shouldn’t.
MAX has been advertising its service for over a year by highlighting access to live sports prominently pushing the NBA as its poster child, with the idea that if people subscribe to the service they will get the live sports “free” for a limited time. This limited time apparently included the entire NBA season. This tells me that the company already knows its sports offering is not attractive enough to merit an extra charge. Once it loses the NBA there is a fat chance it will be able to justify an extra $10.00 per month.
Expect TNT to be sold
Without the NBA TNT is now the home of some NHL hockey and essentially nothing else. It is what has been defined as a zombie channel that plays a selection of movies and reruns of syndicated TV shows 24-7. The company does not invest in original programming for the network making it very much extra weight in an era of belt-tightening. I really expect it to be sold off. Heck, maybe Comcast will buy it and put the band back together for NBA coverage essentially remaking the 1990s when the NBA lived on TNT and NBC. WBD could then shift the rest of its sports rights to TBS thus making it the sports-centric arm of its portfolio while also using TruTV as overflow when viable or necessary. The company has set up a deal with ESPN to feature college football playoff games going forward which may well give it a boost in January and who knows it may hold on to customers. It worked for Peacock with the NFL games.
What’s Next for WBD
Depending on how much they pay for the simulcast of the college football playoffs, Warner Brothers Discovery will have a lot more money to invest in its core programming on MAX. WBD spent 1.3 billion on its last NBA rights deal and the league is expecting over 2.4 billion this time. According to reports the sublicensing of the college football playoffs will cost in the hundreds of millions. That could be great news to anybody looking to develop high-profile original content for MAX and could also lead to numerous cheap-to-produce reality TV shows for the Discovery networks side of the equation.
Over the next year expect to hear whispers that the NHL is not long for TNT. The NHL deal was signed in 2021 before the current leadership and ownership team was involved. ANd since the company became Warner Brothers Discovery the theme has been cut, slash and burn. Whether it was original programming on TNT and TBS, which is all but gone already, already filmed movies and now most likely the NBA it seems like spending on cable content outside of the core HBO and Discovery network brands is a non starter. Even its library content has been licensed out to multiple streamers.
The NHL agreement which started with the 2021 season will be over halfway through its 7-year term by the end of next season meaning it will be just about the right time for David Sazlav to let it slip that maybe he doesn’t think live sports is an important to the bottom line as other programming.
