{"id":409533,"date":"2026-01-13T04:53:15","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T04:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/409533\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T04:53:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T04:53:15","slug":"nba-beginning-2026-with-viewership-up-18-from-last-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/409533\/","title":{"rendered":"NBA beginning 2026 with viewership up 18% from last season"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-media \">The NBA is beginning 2026 with viewership up 18% from the same period last season, as added games on broadcast TV \u2014 and fewer on cable \u2014 plus another strong Christmas have helped boost gains in Year 1 of a new media deal. Games across ABC\/ESPN, NBC and Prime Video have averaged 2.02 million viewers to date, up over what ABC\/ESPN and TNT\/truTV had at the start of 2025. That average goes closer to 1.8 million if one were to include the nonexclusive games airing on NBA TV.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-media \">Looking at regional delivery of games, 17 of 29 teams in the U.S. are seeing season-over-season gains thus far. Many of those teams are currently in business with Main Street Sports Group, which <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sportsbusinessjournal.com\/Articles\/2026\/01\/05\/main-street-misses-january-payments-to-nba-teams-15-day-cure-period-begins-soon\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">missed RSN payments to a number of those franchises recently<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-media \">NBC saw a strong start with its package on Oct. 21 and hasn\u2019t looked back. That was the best NBA Tip-Off doubleheader in 15 years. Coast 2 Coast Tuesday (primarily regionalized windows) then debuted Oct. 28, with the Dec. 2 Knicks-Celtics game becoming the best pre-Christmas audience for the NBA on a Tuesday since 1996. Across all Tuesday games, NBC is averaging 2.9 million viewers, up 87% from the same Tuesday prime-time window last season. The company would not disclose Peacock-specific numbers for games on Monday night windows, but those are no doubt lower than linear TV had previously.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-media \">ESPN and ABC are up 30% season-to-date, albeit with fewer games on cable TV this season under the new media deal. The networks are averaging 2.53 million viewers, which includes the ABC Christmas games and a mix of midweek and weekend games on ESPN.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-media \">Prime Video\u2019s debut NBA season is seeing the service average 1.2 million viewers per game. Looking at just comparable windows to last season, Amazon is holding its own \u2014 down just 3% from national networks in those windows last season. But in those same comparable windows, viewership among adults 18-34 is up 13%, while adults 18-49 is up 20% and adults 25-54 is up 17%. The Knicks-Spurs Emirates NBA Cup Final remains Prime Video\u2019s best game at 3.1 million viewers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-media \">Like with Prime Video\u2019s NFL games and NASCAR races, the audience is significantly younger than with linear TV. The NBA\u2019s median age on Prime Video is 46.6 years old, which is nearly eight years younger than the NBA on linear TV this season (54.5).<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-media \">The NBA has also seen a total audience of 115 million people in the U.S. watch national games this season, the best figure for that metric at this point in the season on record (data going back to 2002). The number of viewers across NBC\/Peacock, ESPN\/ABC, Prime Video and NBA TV is up 85% vs. the same point last year. The NBA has also generated 75 billion video views across social media platforms, up 32% from the same point last season, per data from Videocites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NBA is beginning 2026 with viewership up 18% from the same period last season, as added games&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":409534,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[2574,64,63,794,590,122662,85],"class_list":["post-409533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-amazon","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-espn","tag-nba","tag-nbc-sports-group","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}