In early October, a few weeks before the 2025 season tipped off, NBA commissioner Adam Silver found himself in a hallway inside NBC Sports’ facility in Stamford, Connecticut, staring at a makeshift wall of screens.
A team of executives and developers from NBCUniversal were manning the station, showing off the experience they built inside Peacock to highlight the slate of more than 100 games that the company will stream each season. Silver listened intently, asking questions as he took in the demo.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter a few minutes earlier inside the custom built set that NBC constructed for its NBA studio shows, Silver marveled at how sports has completely transformed the streaming landscape, with his league’s partners NBCU, Amazon and Disney now all-in on streaming.
“Here we are at NBCUniversal today, but I’ve been to similar meetings at Disney and Amazon, and it’s quite incredible the amount of resources that they are putting behind their sports properties, I think with a recognition that that live sports are increasingly differentiating themselves from virtually all other forms of programming on their networks or on their platforms, and so it makes complete sense for them to be making these sort of investments,” Silver said.
Indeed. A quick glance at the current state of streaming underscores Silver’s assessment, with the recent Major League Baseball deals with NBCU, ESPN and Netflix only further underscoring that fact.
Media companies, sports leagues and even A-list talent have quietly shifted their priorities to streaming platforms, preparing to leave the linear world behind should that business collapse entirely.
NBCU’s Peacock has basically become a sports platform, with the NFL, NBA, MLB, college football and the Olympics forming a year-round cadence; Paramount+ has long leaned on the NFL but its massive $7.7 billion UFC deal is a sign of larger ambitions in the space; and while the…