The NBA finished with increased viewership in the 2025-26 season, the league’s first year in a new national media rights deal that began in the fall. The league saw a 16 percent jump in average viewers for its games across NBC/Peacock, ABC/ESPN and Amazon Prime Video, averaging 1.78 million per game, which it says is the highest in seven years.
The NBA also saw its highest viewership totals in 24 years, an 86 percent jump over last season, likely helped by an increase in nationally televised broadcasts. The league added 75 more national TV games this season, a 44 percent increase from last season.
The league’s decision to return to a broadly available traditional broadcast network like NBC helped it reach more viewers. Games on NBC/Peacock, mostly on Sunday and Tuesday nights, averaged 2.8 million viewers, the network said.
It had 57 games with at least two million average viewers and 19 with at least three million, both of which were viewership averages that had not been reached in 15 years.
Analysis
Announced in the summer of 2024, the league’s 11-year, $76 billion-plus collection of TV distribution rights represented a hard pivot from its longstanding relationship with TNT Sports, both re-introducing younger viewers to NBC’s NBA coverage, a staple of the 1990s, and introducing all NBA fans to a requirement of paying for an additional platform beyond cable or a streaming bundler like YouTube TV — Amazon Prime Video.
All three of the NBA’s TV partners upped their game heading into the 2025-2026 season, commensurate with the premium paid for the rights:
• ESPN licensed the iconic “Inside the NBA” show and its core team of Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal.
• NBC made Mike Tirico the lead play-by-play voice and sprinkled in clips of an interview session with Michael Jordan.
• Prime Video brought in Ian Eagle as lead play-by-play voice and filled its studio show with NBA legends like Dwyane Wade, Dirk Nowitzki and Blake Griffin.
The partners rolled out an innovative seven-day-a-week TV rotation, anchored by NBC transitioning from “Sunday Night Football” — the most-watched primetime show on U.S. TV — to “Sunday Night Basketball” in the back half of the NBA season.
The strategy wasn’t without growing pains, including educating fans on where and how to watch the game, and a largely listless All-Star Weekend that unofficially relaunched NBA TV coverage following the NFL season.
Prime Video’s postseason debut on Monday for the first of four Play-In games — exclusively airing on its platform — drew attention for its thrilling, back-and-forth matchup between the Charlotte Hornets and Miami Heat. However, the game stumbled near the finish, with a two-minute window of “technical difficulties” that kept viewers from seeing a critical 30-second stretch of action, before the glitch was resolved and fans caught the game’s exciting final 30 seconds.
All season long, there had been a running discussion — both qualitative and quantitative — about the state of the NBA with fans, largely using the slow drip of national TV ratings as a proxy for enthusiasm.
While the season-long increase can be largely attributed to a few key factors noted above — like more nationally televised games and the introduction of a large traditional broadcast platform like NBC, in addition to an industry-wide lift for all sports TV thanks to Nielsen’s more expansive methodology — it is a notable increase nonetheless.
Ultimately, the proof of success doesn’t rest in regular-season ratings as much as the level to which fans tune into the playoffs over the next two months, as the NBA puts its best product on the floor, matched by three broadcast partners putting big investments in attempts to get fans to tune in. — Dan Shanoff
