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For decades, tuning into a sporting event at home involved watching a traditional broadcast on your TV. These days, however, many viewers aren’t just watching on their TV—they’ve got the game streaming right to their phones.
After more than two decades, NBC and the NBA have revived their partnership just in time to face this new challenge. In a media landscape where fans consume sports across traditional broadcasts, streaming platforms, and mobile devices, the question is no longer about how to televise the game, but how to design an experience that cultivates the league’s next generation of stars, its culture, and fandom while honoring the nostalgia that once defined the NBA on NBC.
“Our job is to document and cover the game and really celebrate the game,” says Pierre Moossa, coordinating producer for NBC Sports. “That was what we used to do back in the time when we had the NBA on NBC.”
Celebrating the game has become more complex as sports fans’ viewing habits are increasingly fragmented. “The consumption of sports is always evolving,” Moossa says. “Whether it’s social media, digital, social, streaming, we need to meet the viewer [where they are].”
To solve this, the NBA and NBC—in concert with Peacock, NBC’s streaming platform—are launching a new mobile-first feature called Courtside Live. It’s designed to function alongside traditional broadcast and gives Peacock viewers an unprecedented degree of production control by allowing them to swipe between multiple camera angles in real time, creating a more intimate experience of games.
Jeff Bezos could save The Washington Post, but he won’t. Here’s why
News that The Washington Post had laid off hundreds of workers and scrapped several sections of the storied paper altogether stunned the journalism community last week. The Post cut roughly one-third of its staff, reduced local coverage, and completely destroyed its sports and international departments.
The paper is owned by Jeff Bezos. The Amazon founder, who has a staggering net worth of approximately $250 billion, bought the Post for $250 million in 2013. The newspaper has consistently lost more money than it has made since the 2020 election, yet has long been considered a stalwart of American dailies.
But last week, the Post’s editor-in-chief Matt Murray told employees the layoffs were part of a “strategic reset” meant to attract more customers. Though he acknowledged the cuts were “painful,” the overall messaging seemed to be that they were necessary.
Of course, not everyone agrees. Martin Baron, who served as the outlet’s executive editor until 2021, told The Guardian: “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
But one question has persistently risen out of the fog of disappointment and disillusionment: If Jeff Bezos understood that owning such a vital newspaper was a “sacred trust,” why is he no longer willing to keep it running at a loss for a tiny percentage of his net worth?
Yes, the financial optics for The Washington Post aren’t the most promising: The New York Times reported in 2022 that the Post’s online ad revenue fell to $70 million that year, a 15% drop from 2021. Last year the number of print subscriptions fell to below 100,000 for the first time in 55 years. The Post hoped to gain 5 million digital subscribers by 2025; in late 2024, the outlet reported having approximately 2.5 million digital subscribers. And the Post lost $177 million in 2023 and 2024 combined, per The New Yorker.
Trebor Scholz, a scholar-activist and associate professor of culture and media at The New School in New York City who has authored several books on labor and economics, hinted that it might just be that Bezos simply doesn’t find the Post “useful” anymore. Bezos is a businessman first and foremost, and if the paper isn’t making money, cuts have to be made. “I think financially, [the Post] is not a great consideration for him, right?” Scholz says. He also pointed out that Bezos may have “lost interest” in the newspaper after owning it for several years, and called to mind Elon Musk’s decision to purchase X (then called Twitter) in 2022.
