The NBA began experimenting with micropayments to allow out-of-market fans to watch the fourth quarter of Friday night’s games for just 99 cents.
This follows through on a vision shared by commissioner Adam Silver on a sports business innovation panel at CES in 2017. Citing the league’s move from an all-or-nothing season-long subscription to NBA League Pass to a model where individual games became available, he added that smaller segments could follow:
“I think you’re going to get to the point where somebody wants to watch the last five minutes of the game, and they go click, they’ll pay a set price for five minutes as opposed to what they would pay for two hours of the game.