NBA commissioner Adam Silver told a scrum of reporters in Las Vegas that he expects the league’s local streaming hub will be up and running by the time the 2027-28 season rolls around, with temporary arrangements in the works for the teams that had their existing in-market deals disrupted by the demise of the Main Street Sports RSNs.“In terms of local television, I feel we are making progress there,” Silver said Tuesday night during a Summer League session. While the commissioner wouldn’t get “specific about some of the media companies who are demonstrating interest” in partnering with the NBA on a long-term in-market distribution scheme, his subsequent remarks suggested that at least one of the top streaming services was in the running.“If you look at the lifecycle of the streaming companies and their interest in live sports, it was only a few years ago when some of those same companies were saying that [it] didn’t make sense within their business models—that they didn’t really see an opportunity to acquire these kinds of sports rights,” Silver said. “And then just jump a little bit, you know, a few years later, and you see almost all of them now are very much engaged.”For the NBA, the inflection point arrived when Amazon’s Prime Video inked an 11-year, $19.8 billion rights package in July 2024, for which the streamer picked up 66 regular-season games per cycle. While that’s a global pact, Silver noted that many of the tech giants that only recently began snapping up broad distribution deals for live sports “are now seeing that value on the local level as well.”Which is not to say that Amazon is as fired up about the prospect of getting into the local sports business as, say, Google’s YouTube or ESPN. As part of a recent three-year renewal of its deal with Major League Baseball, ESPN secured the in-market streaming rights for six clubs (Diamondbacks, Guardians, Rockies, Twins, Padres and Mariners), although that arrangement isn’t set to fully coalesce until the 2027 season. While ESPN has been mum about pursuing plans for a similar arrangement with the NBA, almost nothing is off the table as Jimmy Pitaro’s team continues to beef up the DTC platform.As is the case with NBC and Netflix, ESPN’s revamped MLB contract expires at the close of the 2028 campaign, whereupon commissioner Rob Manfred hopes to consolidate all of its clubs’ streaming rights into a package controlled by the league. The impetus for baseball to seize control of in-market games was accelerated by the demise of the Main Street Sports RSNs, which marooned nine MLB clubs. At the time of Main Street’s shuttering, the NBA’s exposure to the RSN model was somewhat greater, with 13 teams suddenly in need of a new local distribution partner.Since the FanDuel Sports Network RSNs went under, three NBA franchises (the Bucks, Heat and Pistons) have secured one-year contracts with local over-the-air TV stations. The remaining 10 teams are currently in talks with regional broadcast affiliates and streaming platforms such as DAZN and Victory+. All 13 of the teams impacted by the RSN implosion are expected to join the NBA’s new digital hub in 2027, and at least five clubs with short-term OTA deals in place are also likely candidates to get in on the new distribution scheme.While Manfred has maintained that he prefers that each of the 30 MLB clubs will cede its local media rights to the league, Silver’s plan for 2027 and beyond leans more on the carrot than the stick. Given the huge payouts realized by certain big-market NBA teams—for example, the Lakers last season generated $192.1 million in rights fees via its legacy Spectrum SportsNet pact; under the final year of the deal (in 2031-32), escalators will have nudged the team’s annual take to nearly $250 million—it’s unlikely that the league will be in a position to make a matching offer to its top-tier clubs.