The biggest problem with NBA broadcasts now

Convenience has to remain a priority. That means allowing easier non-live options.

Good morning. Let's basketball.

Complaints about the NBA moving fully into the streaming era this season have been rampant. It's hard to know how much of that is simple grousing about change and how much is legitimate confusion. At no point this season have I been confused about which service to load up to find the game I want to watch, but then again, I write a daily newsletter that ... includes the schedule at the bottom. This was my first season as a true cord-cutter – I used YouTube TV in 2024-25, and downgraded to just the individual streaming services this year thanks to the NBA's contractual shift from TNT to Peacock and Amazon Prime and the launch of standalone ESPN access (which I access through the Disney+ bundle).

An important note here is that things with NBA broadcasts have been pretty static for decades now. TNT had the NBA for 36 years. NBC had been out of the picture for 25 years. The national T.V. broadcast schedule shifted year-to-year as the league avoided competing with the NFL to the extent possible. But broadly, you knew when and where to find NBA action from Halloween to Easter. And then the playoffs were very straightforward.

This is all to say that fans will figure it out if they haven't already. Most of my NBA viewing happens on a T.V. operating the Android OS. That algorithm absolutely has not figured out how to serve me NBA games in the recommendations bar, so I always have to know which game I'm after and where it is. I loaded NBA League Pass through Prime Video, so that was the most frequent stop. (The actual NBA app on my particular T.V. set-up is garbage, so I relied on Prime, where it was much smoother.) Other T.V. operating systems may be better at proactively serving up games; the Roku set-up I have in another room isn't much better (there are all of three icons in the corner, almost all of which end up being older movies on, you guessed it, the Roku Channel, which I have never opened).

In any case, this is a solvable problem. And the longer the games are on Prime Video and Peacock, and the more the schedule stabilizes, the easier it'll be for fans to quickly find the games they want to watch. Maybe someday the NBA will fix its own app and the streaming service log-ins through the NBA app will allow someone to open just that app and seamlessly watch games from any of the services they subscribe to there. It's been possible in the mobile NBA app, though "seamless" is not a word I'd use to describe it. (Also, Magnus Carlsen is right: "no spoiler" mode is a bit too hit-or-miss for me! That dude is playing a classical chess tournament and just wants to be surprised and delighted by Victor Wembanyama and Alex Caruso. Is that too much to ask?)

The real problem for me is not being able to watch Peacock games on delay.