NBA seeking to dismiss the TNT suit tl:dr: Zaslav don't got the juice -- (edited)
Posted by
mr mooch (aka pickmix)
Aug 24 '24, 18:22
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“For example, to ensure the financial security of billions of dollars of rights fee payments over the deal’s 11-year term, Amazon agreed, inter alia, to maintain an escrow account from which rights fees will automatically be paid to the NBA as they become due,” the supporting memorandum of law from the league’s Sullivan & Cromwell lawyers reads. “TBS eliminated this protection by giving itself the option to instead provide the NBA with syndicated letters of credit that the NBA can access only if TBS’s payments are late. That is not even close to the same thing.”
"Plaintiffs’ claims fail at the outset because the MRE did not give TBS the right to match Amazon’s offer. As the Complaint acknowledges, TBS’s matching rights are limited to third-party offers relating to NBA game distribution rights that TBS “currently enjoy[s]” under the NBA/TBS Agreement. TBS does not “currently enjoy” the rights covered by Amazon’s offer—namely, rights to distribute live NBA games on a disaggregated, standalone basis via an SVOD service streamed over the Internet. Instead, TBS’s current rights are limited to distributing games as part of a linear cable television network, together with the rest of the network’s programming. Although the Complaint notes that individual NBA games are currently streamed on Max, an SVOD streaming service owned by WBD, the source of the rights to distribute those games in that manner is not the NBA/TBS Agreement, but rather an entirely separate agreement between NBA Media Ventures, LLC and a different WBD subsidiary, Bleacher Report, Inc., that does not contain matching rights."
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