The Warriors are playing your favorite team, and you assumed it would be a blowout. You get home early from a night out, and it’s a three-point game with five minutes left! You’d want to watch that, and that’s exactly what the NBA has realized.
The NBA might allow fans to pay to watch the last 5 minutes of games
Adam Silver hinted at the change during a panel at CES 2017.
Photo by David Dow/NBAE via Getty Images
At the Sports Business Innovation panel at CES 2017 in Las Vegas, NBA commissioner Adam Silver talked about allowing fans to just watch “crunchtime” for a small charge. Last season, NBA League Pass began allowing viewers to purchase one game at a time at a $6.99 charge. This potential addition would presumably work the same way, except it would be limited to the final five minutes.
“Certainly we’re going from a place where it was one price for an entire season of games,” said Silver, as reported by Diamond Leung of SportTechie. “Now just in the last two years, we’ve made single games available. But I think you’re going to get to the point where somebody wants to watch the last five minutes of the game, and they go click, they’ll pay a set price for five minutes as opposed to what they would pay for two hours of the game.”
You could also imagine fans buying the end of games when a certain player is close to setting a record. With a streamlined process, you could go from an alert on Twitter to watching the game on your phone or even through a gaming device, even in 30 seconds or less.
It doesn’t sound like this is happening imminently, but Silver making sure the NBA is at the forefront of changing technology makes sense. Under Silver, the NBA is exploring virtual reality and adjusting the structure of the playoffs or the draft.
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