The NBA is accelerating plans to launch a centralized streaming hub for local game broadcasts, potentially as early as the 2026-27 season. The move is a direct response to the financial collapse of Diamond Sports Group, which operates Bally Sports and currently handles local broadcasts for 13 NBA teams.
The league intends to consolidate the rights for those teams and package them for digital platforms including Amazon and DAZN, replacing a regional sports network model that is no longer financially viable.
Four teams on NBC Sports regional networks are also facing broadcast uncertainty as NBC plans to exit the RSN business
The Boston Celtics, Golden State Warriors, Philadelphia 76ers, and Sacramento Kings currently have local broadcast agreements with NBC Sports Regional Networks. But NBC Sports has signaled plans to exit the regional sports network business, which would leave those four teams in the same position as the 13 clubs affected by Diamond’s collapse — without a stable local broadcast home. For now, fans of those teams can watch through NBC Sports regionally or as an add-on through a Peacock subscription, but that arrangement has a limited shelf life.
The timing lines up with the NBA’s new national media deal, which includes NBCUniversal alongside Disney and Amazon as major partners. A centralized streaming hub would effectively fold the local broadcast problem into the league’s broader digital strategy rather than leaving individual teams to negotiate their own solutions with a shrinking pool of regional carriers.
Teams that operate their own networks like the Lakers and Knicks would face a different set of negotiations to join a centralized model
Not every team is in the same situation. The Los Angeles Lakers and New York Knicks run their own broadcast networks, which generate significant revenue and give those organizations control over their content and distribution.
Asking those teams to fold their rights into a league-wide hub means convincing them that the centralized model will match or exceed what they are already earning independently. That is a harder sell than consolidating rights from teams whose broadcast partners are going bankrupt.
The broader challenge for the NBA is balancing the financial floor the hub would create for smaller-market teams with the autonomy that larger-market teams have built around their own media operations. A centralized platform offers wider reach and a more predictable revenue model, but it also means every team gives up some degree of control over how and where their games are distributed.
The league appears to be betting that the collapse of the traditional RSN model has made that tradeoff unavoidable for most teams, and that the holdouts will eventually follow once the economics of the new platform become clear.
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