Adam Silver details how NBA will change its broadcasting structure / News - Basketnews.com

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver shared that the NBA should focus on the younger demographic, which is predominant in the league's viewership, and provide digital solutions even when a traditional cable/satellite option is available. Silver put out an idea of possibly using social media to stream games in order to utilize better customization and engagement.

Credit: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP - Scanpix Credit Patrick T. Fallon/AFP - Scanpix

With the NBA playoffs underway, more and more people tune in to watch NBA basketball from all around the world. Nevertheless, a significant portion of all viewership is inside the USA. The league's commissioner Adam Silver thinks the way the games are being broadcast in the States should be changed.

With Diamond Sports Group, which controls Bally Sports, a network that broadcasts games of more than half of NBA teams locally, filing for bankruptcy, a new landscape is about to form in the basketball broadcasting world.

"It's a wake-up call for everybody in our industry and everybody here that you have to pay attention to your customers, to your fans. They're speaking loud and clearly here," Silver said during the CAA World Congress of Sports. "Again, an exciting incredible opportunity not just to reach them but to do it in what used to be unimaginable ways in terms of personalization, customization, so many news fascinating ways to engage fans."

Silver thinks other means than traditional streaming and broadcasting, including social media, should be implemented to better utilize the customization during live streams that each platform provides.

"As we approach our new national deals, there might be a solution for local rights, probably it looks likely there will be some sort of a hybrid where you are going to continue to have traditional cable and satellite distribution, and you will probably see more over-the-air distribution, almost a return to the past like we were in the old days, more national use of broadcast, more local use of broadcast," Silver started off on the upcoming media deal.

"Then, of course, there will be streaming on top of that. That's where the young viewers are. What's happened now from a distribution standpoint, you have streaming services now closer to the footprint of broadcast television. Around 125 million homes use streaming," he shared the numbers. "Putting aside age now, essentially there are 50 million homes that don't get cable or satellite now. [It's] a huge underserved market but from a league standpoint also a huge opportunity."

Later on during the conference, Silver reiterated that even though streaming is a separate entity in the entire structure of NBA broadcasting, tradition providers should also focus on providing digital solutions for their clients to account for the changing tendencies.

"In terms of the fundamentals of the business, everybody sees what's happening in the television market. You've had a dramatic decline in the amount of cable homes. Particularly for us, it's not just the decline. When you include virtual distributors, it's not as low as I think a lot of people think. It's still 75 million homes receiving cable/satellite programming in the United States," Silver said.

The NBA, Silver explains, has a particularly young viewer demographic, so the ways the games are being shown to them have to reflect the current situation.

"There's a particular impact on the sport of ours that has a very young viewership. The numbers are dramatic in terms of that falloff of our young fans whether or not they're subscribing to cable, because often that's just the broadband provider, they're not watching traditional television the way an older generation was," the commissioner explained."

"It's why Sinclair, now Diamond, was so focused on taking those same games and distributing them digitally not just from the millennial standpoint. As they're trying to reimagine their business, part of it is having a digital package to go alongside the linear package. Those 75 million homes, even if they continue to drop down, are still going to be important for the mid-term future," Silver concluded.

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