Shares of Warner Bros. Discovery fell about 8% at market open after the NBA’s announcement yesterday of three big rights deals with three WBD rivals, shutting it out of professional basketball.
It’s the latest hit to an already depressed stock (changing hands now at below $8) that’s already so low that some on Wall Street are calling for CEO David Zaslav to split the company or merge again — just two years after the vaunted Warner Media-Discovery deal. The company is said to be exploring options.
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Tim Nollen of Macquarie Equity Research downgraded the stock this morning to “neutral” from “outperform”, meaning he doesn’t think it’s going anywhere soon. The shares are cheap already, he acknowledged, “but we don’t see a good fundamental investment case now.”
“We have held onto our WBD rating in hopes that it would retain the NBA; losing these key rights means it now loses a core content asset for both its linear networks and its Max streaming service. The former is bad enough – ad revenues will now drop sharply starting in 4Q25, and bargaining leverage on cable affiliate renewals now falls. But it’s the lost opportunity for the Max streaming service that worries us the most over time. We have viewed Max as a broad and deep streaming service with content spanning the Warner Bros. studio, HBO, and Discovery’s lifestyle networks, plus children’s shows and sports – but Max’s sports offering will now be weaker without the NBA,” he said in a note to clients.
The NBA announced Wednesday that the trio of Disney/ESPN/ABC, Comcast/NBC/Peacock, and Amazon Prime won the rights to NBA games for 11 years starting in the fall of 2025. Reported price tags are, respectively, $2.6 billion, $2.5 billion and $1.9 billion.
Longtime NBA rights holder WBD had matching rights built into its contract and did match Amazon’s streaming package, the least costly of the three. But the NBA declared, without elaborating, that it was not a match — possibly because of the greater reach of the massive e-commerce and entertainment giant — and closed the deal with Amazon.
WBD indicated it would take “appropriate action,” indicating it plans to litigate the NBA’s decision, which it may be entitled to do. But, noted Nollen, “it’s hard to see an amicable endgame.”
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