ESPN’s live NBA telecasts averaged 1.19 million viewers, off 10% from the reconstituted 2019-20 season and down 25% versus 2018-19. The slowly collapsing pay-TV model is doing ESPN and TNT no favors, although Bristol this season seems to have got the worst of it. (For what it’s worth, virtual MVPDs like Hulu+ Live and Fubo have helped stop the bleeding a bit, accounting for 6.76 million additional video subs as of March 31.) households that made up the multichannel universe in 2015. Per the earnings reports of the major pay-TV players, approximately 1.9 million video subs cut the cord in the first quarter of this year, bringing the reach of the traditional wireline/DBS ecosystem down below 72 million viewers-quite a tumble from the 101.2 million U.S.
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The NBA ratings crush is also happening as the cable, satellite and telco-TV operators are struggling to retain paying subscribers. In other words, only seven of the 74 scripted broadcast shows that aired in primetime this season managed to serve up as many demographically relevant commercial impressions as did ABC’s NBA games, and they were all significantly pricier buys. Ratings performance and average unit costs aren’t plotted on a direct-relationship graph, and the key advantage of live sports is that it’s pretty much the last programming genre in which advertising impressions are made at scale. As long as demand remains flat-to-up, the diminishment in transactional impressions will almost always lead to a further increase in the price of the commercial inventory.
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#ABC LOS ANGELES NBA FINALS 7 POST GAME COVERAGE TV#
If there’s a silver lining to any of this, it’s wrapped around the supply-and-demand dynamic that underpins the TV ad market. In other words, nearly one-third (32%) of ABC’s dollar demo has wandered off in the course of two years. Two years ago, ABC’s NBA coverage averaged 1.47 million adults 18-49 per game, a turnout that shrunk to 1.16 million in 2019-20 and fell all the way to 993,000 fans in the under-50 set this season. As such, it should come as little surprise that ABC’s suite of NBA games took a greater hit than the two cable packages with an average draw of 2.67 million viewers per game, the network’s live hoops coverage was off 10% versus last season’s 2.96 million and down 26% versus 2018-19 (3.61 million viewers).įor advertisers, the NBA’s shrinking broadcast audience coincides with an even more vertiginous drop-off among the members of the core target demo. The fall-off in tube time was particularly evident at the Big Four networks, which saw their aggregate primetime deliveries plunge 22% in the span of a single year.
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That said, the headwinds are inescapable regardless of how the data is framed as with every other sport that leans heavily on linear TV, the NBA is at the mercy of an ecosystem that’s been battered by secular declines.ĭuring the 35 weeks of the 2020-21 broadcast season, which officially concluded yesterday, overall TV usage was down 10% compared to the year-ago period, for a net loss of 8.64 million viewers per night. While this season’s declines weren’t as steep when compared to the patchwork 2019-20 effort-the year-over-year drop was 14%-it is, perhaps, more instructive to analyze the 2020-21 deliveries within the context of what amounts to the most recent undisrupted season. In 2018-19, which brought an end to the four-year ratings stimulus effort that was the Warriors-Cavs rivalry, the three networks averaged 1.75 million viewers. The NBA over the last two seasons has lost a quarter of its TV audience, and while it will be some time before any year-to-year comparisons can be made without an intervening asterisk, the shrinking ratings make for diminished expectations as the league heads into the playoffs.Īccording to Nielsen live-plus-same-day data, the 168 regular-season NBA games on ABC, ESPN and TNT in 2020-21 averaged 1.32 million viewers, down 25% compared to the last pre-pandemic campaign two years earlier.