Why a new NBA deal could mean cuts to your favorite NBC and Peacock shows

The NBA is on the verge of finalizing a series of rights deals that will not only reshape the sports landscape but also inject a staggering $76 billion into the league’s coffers over the span of 11 years.

If you’re a basketball enthusiast, get ready for a new era: Currently, national NBA rights are split between Disney’s ESPN/ABC and Warner Bros Discovery’s TNT; in the future, these rights are expected to be shared by Disney, Amazon, and Comcast. Notably, Comcast plans to air some games on NBC and others on its Peacock streaming service. This could potentially lead to the need to subscribe to new streaming platforms, a situation similar to what NFL fans have already encountered.

But what if you don’t care about basketball? Well, you may be in for some change, too: The Wall Street Journal reports that Comcast will be making programming changes to accommodate and pay for the new sports deal that is estimated to cost $2.5 billion a year:

Comcast declined to comment.

On the one hand, this makes plenty of sense: Live sports is perhaps the only thing that can reliably generate a TV audience these days (though the NBA is most definitely not the NFL). So why not spend money on that, and take some of it from programming that is less effective?

On the other hand: This has real echoes of the old TV model that lots of people said they hated — the one where people who didn’t care about sports ended up paying for sports anyway because the one-sized-fits-all pay TV cable bundle made them pay for ESPN and other sports programming.

The best-case scenario here for non-sports fans is that the addition of the NBA helps them, too: Maybe so many more people will watch NBC and Peacock that those services grow and generate more revenue, and more programming, and non-sports fans will get more stuff they like, too.

Maybe! But in the near term, the calculus is clear: If you’re spending $2.5 billion on sports, you need to find $2.5 billion (or at least a very big number) of resources somewhere else. And if those resources happen to include your favorite shows, you’re out of luck.