Billionaire and NBA team owner Mark Cuban is standing up for fans and taking on league commissioner Adam Silver in a series of recent tweets. Here’s how Cuban is voicing support for fans as the cost of consuming content has increased.
Mark Cuban Embraces NBA Fans
Cuban sold the majority ownership of the NBA team, the Dallas Mavericks, recently, but remains dedicated and active within the sport.
For years, Cuban has been an advocate for fans, with the Mavericks previously offering tickets that were cheaper than a family eating at McDonald’s, according to the billionaire.
Recent comments from Silver at a press conference were viewed by many fans and NBA experts as being tone-deaf in the face of rising costs to watch nationally televised games.
“There’s a huge amount of our content that people can essentially consume for free,” Silver said, as reported by Sports Illustrated. “I mean this is very much a highlights-based sport. So Instagram, TikTok, Twitter you name it.”
Silver said there is an “enormous amount of content out there” that is free when it comes to the NBA, mentioning the social media platforms above and YouTube, the video platform owned by Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL.
The NBA commissioner’s comments came as he was asked about the rising cost of streaming platforms and consumers needing to have multiple subscriptions and spend more to view all their team’s games or all nationally televised games.
Cuban shared a post about Silver’s comments and offered his take.
“Adam definitely whiffed on this one. But I can tell you that unless a lot has changed in the last 20 months, he is one of the people standing up for fans in a room where a lot of owners are not,” Cuban tweeted.
Cuban said some teams are offering free local broadcasts, with only their nationally televised exclusive games costing money to watch. The billionaire team owner argued that teams should remember their fans.
“I’m not a fan of pricing out fans from games. At least make the upper deck end zones cheap. It doesn’t really impact total revenue.”
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Battle For Streaming & Revenue
The comments from Silver come as the NBA just signed a massive 11-year $77 billion media rights deal with The Walt Disney Company DIS, Comcast Corporation CMCSA and Amazon.com Inc AMZN.
Under the new deal, there will be nationally televised games on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays all season long and all seven days once the NFL and NCAA Football seasons are over.
Fans will need subscriptions to ESPN, Prime Video, Peacock, along with broadcast networks to be able to watch all the games, with some exclusive to streaming platforms during the season.
Cuban also broke down the financial ramifications in another tweet.
“The streamers are competing for subscribers. Look at it this way. If a streamer pays $2.6 billion for 100 games, and they get some playoffs or All Star which are the equivalent of say 5 games. So let’s say 150 games. That’s $17.3 million per game,” Cuban said.
Cuban noted that while that number seems huge, it comes against the cost and associated risk of launching scripted programming on streaming platforms.
“Most of which fail to draw viewers. Each series can cost this much per episode. With the NBA there is an amount of certainty for audience.”
The billionaire said this is why media companies are willing to pay vast amounts, like the new $11 billion per year NBA deal.
“Peacock paid $100 million to the NFL for 1 playoff game and got like 2.3 million new subs and kept 70% of them.”
Cuban said if the NBA can provide the same kind of results, it could determine the future of streaming and the NBA.
“There is too much money that streamers are willing to invest to get and retain subs.”
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