Soon after Brian Roberts’ surprising and carefully crafted decision to bid $2.5 billion per year for NBA rights—a number that blew his competitors, Warner Bros. Discovery and C.E.O David Zaslav, out of the water—the media narrative quickly turned to how the league could help boost Peacock and become shrewdly amortized across two large weekly primetime windows on NBC. But media business veterans, who know that the Comcast C.E.O.  is a savvy negotiator and a P&L viper, also assumed that Comcast and NBCU would be using the rights package as leverage in downstream negotiations with partners and distributors. 

Loyal readers will even recall how I broke the news that part of Comcast’s NBA deal thesis involved their ability to eventually punish WBD in future negotiations by lowering the carriage fees for TNT. WBD’s Turner networks contracts with Comcast are up at the end of next year. With the NBA, TNT currently costs Comcast around $3 per subscriber, per month. Without the NBA, Comcast will push to pay a much lower fee. As the analyst Michael Nathanson told me earlier this week: “Sure, TNT has March Madness and baseball playoffs, but it’s really repeat TV. Why is TNT $3 per month when USA is 50 cents or AMC is $1?”