Madrid, Oct 14 (EFE).- The NBA remodeled its app. And lowered the price. For the 2022-2023 season, watching the 1,230 regular season games, plus those that lead to the playoffs, has a price of 100 euros. In addition, you can see warm up Luka Doncić with built-in microphone, or revive, when and where you want, Pau Gasol’s rings. Overall experience.
While the forms of sports consumption change, especially among young people, the North American basketball league is adapting to the times by promoting its own ‘OTT’ while receiving, according to EFE, data on the growth of its impact in Spain.
With the ‘Copa del Rey’-style tournament in the making, the latest innovation applied to the season, the ‘play-in’ format, had 39% more audience this season compared to the previous one, that of its implementation, on Movistar+ , the platform that has the rights of the NBA in Spain.
An interest that also translates into social networks. NBA Spain profiles recorded a 60% growth in ‘engagement’, the commitment of consumers to their brand. For their part, their accounts in Europe grew by up to 79% and had 72% more video views.
For this reason, the NBA has implemented this form of consumption of the League to its own mobile application, introducing the vertical video format to see the plays of the games in a more dynamic way. Also, this app is available for smart TVs.
The new ‘app’, made by NBA Digital in collaboration with Turner Sports and Microsoft, can be downloaded free of charge and will offer fans a series of content that includes day-to-day videos of the teams, as well as the possibility of rewatching historic matches and the Finals since 2000.
Another important novelty will be the so-called ‘Gameday Experience’, which for the first time will allow fans to follow the press conferences before and after the matches live digitally.
The starting price for the season that starts next morning from Tuesday to Wednesday is 99.99 euros per year. And the ‘premium’ package, to enjoy NBA content on two devices simultaneously, stands at 129.99 euros.
Here’s what it costs to watch all 1,230 regular season games, All-Star Weekend, Title Playoffs and the content mentioned above, plus a documentary series that will explore the culture, history and love of basketball in eight different European cities: Belgrade, Bologna, Leverkusen, Istanbul, Kaunas, Paris, Seville and Thessaloniki.
A price drop that comes after the NBA League Pass, as the competition’s ‘app’ is called, increased its subscribers by 23% last season in Europe, being the most important region for the League outside of the United States . The keys? The return to normality after the coronavirus pandemic and the exponential growth of stars from the old continent in recent years, such as the Greek Giannis Antetokounmpothe Serbian Nikola Jockic -both twice MVP of the NBA in the regular season- and the Slovenian Luka Doncic.
Furthermore, as part of its policy to strengthen the European market, the North American basketball league scheduled 56 games for ‘NBA Saturdays’ and ‘NBA Sundays’ this campaign; that is, meetings in prime time in Europe on Saturdays and Sundays.
An NBA that will start its 76th season after taking a new step in another market. He recently hung the “no tickets” sign at both matches in Abu Dhabi. With the bucks of Antetokounmpo and the Hawks of Bring Young as a claim.
And it is that, as the league transmitted to EFE, in the United Arab Emirates, basketball is the second most watched sport and the NBA has been broadcast there for more than 35 years. For this reason, the competition led by commissioner Adam Silver played its first games in the Persian Gulf. YouGov, an international market research and data analysis firm, estimates that there are 3.2 million NBA fans living in the UAE.
(c) EFE Agency