 | |
| Country | United States |
|---|---|
| Broadcast area | Nationwide |
| Headquarters | Secaucus, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Programming | |
| Language | English |
| Picture format | 1080iHDTV (downscaled toletterboxed480i for theSDTV feed) |
| Ownership | |
| Owner | National Basketball Association |
| History | |
| Launched | November 2, 1999; 26 years ago (1999-11-02) |
| Replaced | CNN/SI (on many cable systems) |
| Former names | NBA.com TV (1999–2003) |
| Links | |
| Website | NBAtv |
| Availability | |
NBA TV is an Americansports-orientedpay televisionnetwork owned and operated by theNational Basketball Association (NBA). Dedicated tobasketball, the network features exhibition, regular season and playoff game broadcasts from the NBA and related professional basketball leagues, as well as NBA-related content including analysis programs,specials anddocumentaries. The network is headquartered inSecaucus, New Jersey. The network also serves as the national broadcaster of theNBA G League andWNBA games. NBA TV is the oldest subscription network in North America to be owned or controlled by a professional sports league, having launched on November 2, 1999.
As of November 2023[update], NBA TV is available to approximately 37.0 million television households in the United States, down from its 2013 peak of 61.0 million households.[1]
The network launched on November 2, 1999[2] asnba.com TV; the channel, which was renamed to the second and current name on 11 February 2003, originally operated from studio facilities housed atNBA Entertainment inSecaucus, New Jersey. The network signed a multi-year carriage agreement with three of the U.S.'s five largest cable providers,Cox Communications,Cablevision andTime Warner Cable, on June 28, 2003; this expanded the network's reach to 45 million pay television households in the U.S., in addition to distribution in 30 countries worldwide. AfterTime Warner shut down the sports news networkCNN/SI in 2002, many cable providers replaced that network with NBA TV.
The network mainly launched with two purposes; to serve as abarker channel for the league'sout-of-market sports packageNBA League Pass, along with featuring statistical and scoring information which was more easily accessible in the pre-broadband age, and it featured mainly archival content from theNBA Entertainment archives in its upper pane to fill programming time. As time went on, the network added more programming, including international basketball leagues and programming fromFIBA usually unseen in the American market. The programming mix and channel format changed around the same time of the CNN/SI shutdown.
On October 8, 2007, it was reported that the National Basketball Association would transfer the channel's operations to Time Warner'sTurner Sports division (operated by the company's Turner Broadcasting System subsidiary).[3]
Turner took over the channel's operations on October 28, 2008, and began using the same announcers and analysts used on TNT'sNBA telecasts.[4] Analysis and news programming also received an upgrade, with production of the programs being relocated to Studio B at Turner Studios inAtlanta, Georgia, located adjacent to Studio J, where TNT's post-game programInside the NBA is broadcast. The repeats of NBA games onTBS andTNT began in 2009, asNBA Classics.
In 2024, the NBA signed a new media rights deal withABC/ESPN,NBC andAmazon Prime Video beginning in the 2025–26 season, ending TNT's broadcasting relationship with the league.[5][6] For several months, the future of the channel remained uncertain with no entity designated to operate the channel.[7] On November 18, TNT parent companyWarner Bros. Discovery announced that they reached a settlement with the NBA over a lawsuit it had filed over Prime Video's contract, which includes certain international and highlights rights for WBD divisions, and a five-year renewal with TNT Sports (formerly Turner Sports) to operate NBA TV and the NBA's digital properties.[8]
On June 27, 2025, it was instead announced that TNT Sports would withdraw from its management agreement with NBA TV and NBA Digital, and its operations would be taken in-house by the league from its headquarters in New Jersey effective October 1. TNT Sports CEO Luis Silberwasser stated that the division was "unable to agree on a path forward that recognized the value of our expertise, quality content and operational excellence that our fans and partners have come to expect from TNT Sports." A sticking point in negotiations was the lower number of games that NBA TV would be able to air due to the new contracts made by NBC and Prime Video, additionally the network will no longer air any playoff games (as that part of the deal was in TNT’s expired package).[9]
On April 16, 2009,DirecTV announced that it had reached a carriage agreement with the NBA to continue carrying NBA TV, moving it (and out-of-market sports packageNBA League Pass) from the satellite provider's Sports Pack add-on tier to its lower-priced Choice Xtra base package on October 1, 2009. DirecTV believed the move will make the channel available to an additional eight million subscribers.[10]
On June 4, 2009,Comcast announced that it had reached an agreement with the NBA to move the channel from the cable provider's Sports Entertainment Package to its basic level Digital Classic package, by the start of the 2009–10 NBA season. Like DirecTV, Comcast estimated that an additional eight million customers would effectively gain access to the channel.[11]Verizon FiOS added the channel andNBA League Pass to its systems on September 23, 2009.[12] The network also signed new multi-year agreements withTime Warner Cable,Cablevision andDish Network on October 22, 2009, as well as a renewal agreement withCox Communications earlier in the year.[12]
With all of the above carriage deals, the NBA estimates that it would increase NBA TV's overall subscriber reach to 45 million pay television homes.[13] On October 29, 2010,AT&T U-verse reached a carriage deal to carry the channel's standard and high definition feeds.[14]
NBA TV is not available to legacyCharter Communications customers using outdated billing plans, which carried the network as NBA.com TV prior to 2004, due to unknown carriage conflicts; NBA League Pass was likewise unavailable on Charter until a broader rollout for the 2020–21 season began (on May 18, 2016, Charter acquired Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks for $78.7 billion, which both carried the network). NBA TV has been available to Charter households where available since February 2017, if a customer switches to the new 'Spectrum' billing plan which united Charter, Time Warner Cable andBright House Networks under theSpectrum branding (this is all likely unrelated to Charter's inheritednaming rights of theCharlotte Hornets' home arena, theSpectrum Center).
As of June 2023[update], the channel was available in 38.6 million homes in the United States.[15]
NBA TV offers news programs devoted to basketball daily, in addition to programs showcasing the lives of individual basketball players, documentaries focusing on a particular NBA team during the season and archived broadcasts of well-known games.
NBA TV carries at least 90 regular season games per season, which typically air four days a week during the NBA season (mainly on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, although occasional Wednesday, Friday and Sunday games may air in the event thatESPN does not hold rights to coverage on those nights), as well as some first-round playoff games. It also carries its own coverage of theNBA draft.
Live games on NBA TV are subject to local blackout restrictions, since NBA TV (despite being owned by the league) does not hold the exclusive broadcast rights to any of its games. Games carried by NBA TV are also carried by each team's local rights holder, either a regional sports network or a broadcast television station.
The network also shows international games, typically on Saturday evenings, with special emphasis on theEuroleague and theMaccabi Tel Aviv team fromIsrael. In April 2005, NBA TV televised theChinese Basketball Association finals for the first time.[16]
The channel's previous flagship program wasNBA Gametime Live, a studio show featuring coverage of news from around the league, and highlights and look-ins at games currently in progress. It broadcast six nights per-week during the NBA season, aside from Thursday nights during the regular season (when the network instead aired encores ofInside the NBA)
On October 11, 2017, it was announced that thePlayers Only franchise, which made its debut last season onTNT, will show live games on NBA TV, starting October 24, 2017 and every Tuesday after that, for the first half of the 2017–18 season before transitioning to TNT for the remainder of the regular season starting January 23, 2018.[17] After the cancellation ofPlayers Only in 2019, Tuesday (first half) and Monday (second half) night games on NBA TV were rebranded asNBA TV Center Court, withBrian Anderson handling the Tuesday night games andSpero Dedes the Monday night games. They are joined alongsideGreg Anthony andDennis Scott.[18] With TNT moving its marquee games to Tuesdays in 2021 during theNFL regular season (thus avoiding competition withThursday Night Football),NBA TV Center Court was moved to Monday nights for most of the season, though it would continue to air select broadcasts on Tuesdays when TNT has other programming commitments.
Beginning 2021, NBA TV began to broadcast a package of men's and women'sSouthwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC)college basketball games in February as an observance ofBlack History Month. This marked NBA TV's first broadcasts of college basketball games.[19][20]
In October 2025, with the transition to in-house operations, NBA TV announced a revamp of its television and digital programming launching on October 15, with goals for the channel and the NBA apps to become a "24/7 hub" for basketball. The new schedule features television simulcasts ofSirius XM NBA Radio shows such asThe Starting Lineup andNBA Today.The Association serves as NBA TV's new flagship studio show, and will also stream for free on the NBA app. The network also acquired rights to various international basketball leagues as part of a partnership withSportradar, and there are plans to broadcast coverage of high school basketball games under theFuture Starts Now banner. The channel will continue to air 60 non-exclusive regular season NBA games per-season.[21][22][23][24]
NBA TV HD is a1080ihigh-definition simulcast feed of NBA TV that is available on most providers. All studio programs and original programs are shot in HD, and all live games and recent game rebroadcasts are televised in HD. The high-definition version of this channel was launched in 2007.
The studio host and analysts vary on each night's broadcast ofNBA Gametime.
NBA TV International is a feed of NBA TV available in countries outside the United States, utilizing the same studio for analysis and commentary segments and taped programming (except forFIBA events and highlights), but largely airs a different lineup of games than the U.S. channel. NBA TV International shows one or two live regular season games per day, with the delayed coverage of selected playoff games that are not broadcast live by NBA TV, allconference semis, finals and theFinals, as well asAll-Star live games and contests and most nationally televised U.S. games (such as those seen on ABC, TNT, ESPN and US feed of NBA TV); the rights to those games are instead sold to domestic television networks in each territory. As of 2022, NBA TV International can be seen in 100 countries via the following partners:
NBA TV Canada, the Canadian version of the channel owned byToronto Raptors ownersMaple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, carries some of the same game broadcasts as the flagship U.S. service, ESPN, and TNT instead of the secondary game package found on NBA TV International.
On 16 October 2010,NBA Premium TV was launched in thePhilippines. It was a redirect broadcast of NBA TV and aired locally televised and nationally televised games in the United States. It went defunct on 1 October 2019, almost 9 years after it existed.
In February 2012, NBA TV International was made available on NBA.TV as an internet subscription channel outside the United States.
OnbeIN Channels Network in theArab world, NBA TV is not available, thoughbeIN Sports NBA airs some of the same games.
On 31 July 2020, the Philippine version of the channel,NBA TV Philippines, was launched.[26]
NBA TV was criticized in the past for its first-round playoff coverage merely passing down the broadcast of a game from aregional sports network for national broadcast, amplifying the chosen team's broadcast and bias for said team to a national level.[27][28] from the 2012 playoffs to the 2025 playoffs, NBA TV produced a full and neutral national broadcast for those games.[29]
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