With the 2022-23 NBA season in full swing, the league is looking to drive a deeper connection with its fans through its newly redesigned NBA App. The free, integrated digital platform — built in partnership with Microsoft — for the first time provides fans direct access to its NBA League Pass out-of-market game package as well as its NBA TV linear cable channel.

Through the app’s free NBA ID membership program, fans can access benefits and rewards from the league as well as its teams and partners, league officials said. Fans can watch live games as well as all pregame and postgame NBA press conferences and media days from every major event.  

With a nod to social media, the App’s new ‘For You’ offering will offer fan preferences and personalization, as well as a vertical video scrolling of content that features real-time highlights of all NBA games in progress.  

On the content side, the App will offer 500 of the best classic games in NBA history as well as every NBA Finals game since 2000. Also, documentary series such as Dream Team, The Doctor, Wilt 100 and NBA Inside Stuff will be available. 

Already the app has scored with viewers: Video views on the app were up nearly 300% globally during the first week of the NBA season in mid-October compared to last year, the league said.

NBA senior VP of media operations and technology Ken DeGennaro spoke with Multichannel News about the revamped NBA App and its appeal to viewers. Here’s an edited transcript of that conversation. 

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MCN: What initially prompted the league to revamp its digital app? 

Ken DeGennaro: With the shift from linear viewing habits to a little bit more digital viewing habits, we felt as though this was the right time to bring the technology staff up on resourcing to be able to build the app to deliver and innovate with a very fan- first mindset. Throughout the pandemic, as things slowed, we continued to invest in the new platform all the way through our launch of the app this past September. All of the technology has been replaced and is now fully cloud-delivered. We have a new partner, Microsoft and its Azure cloud, to help power the application. Now we’re able to get both implicit and explicit responses back from our fans and tailor our experience to that of the individual fan. A good example of that is our ‘For You’ feed, which is a personalized feed featuring content, games and other information tailored to that particular fan based on some of the signals of data that they’ve explicitly told us around their favorite teams and players, as well as some of the behaviors that we recognize just through the usage of the NBA App. 

MCN: Have you seen an uptick in usage among fans since you’ve rolled out the new app? 

KD: We’ve had a wonderful response from our fans. The engagement and usage of the application services and features throughout have been significantly more than we’ve seen historically.

MCN: How important has the integration of League Pass and NBA TV into the app been in terms of that increased response from fans?

KD: It certainly makes it easier to be an NBA fan, right? If you want NBA content, you now know where to go and where to get it. We are learning more and more about the fan and what content we should service, and also drive some discovery of things that fans might not have necessarily considered in the first instance. The other things we’ve really been focusing on are the quality of the experience, that the application works well and that our video gives a premium experience to our fans. 

MCN: How important is it for a league such as the NBA to have a quality, interactive digital app as part of its outreach to fans?

KD: It’s critical to us for us to be able to learn more about how our fans want to interact with our content. Most fans are interested in the game content, but there are a lot of fans that are interested in the content around the game, from the lifestyles and wardrobes of the players all the way to the players’ interests on and off the court. We’re learning more and more about what the fans are interested in, and we’re going to continue to serve all of them at the right levels with the right amount of content for their set of interests. It’s about driving engagement on a personalized level. ■ 

NBCUniversal is bringing interactive entertainment and consumer tech industry vet Chris Heatherly on board as its new executive VP of worldwide games and digital platforms.

Heatherly, who starts Sept. 30, will head up the NBCUniversal Brand Development Games and Digital Platforms business unit, which creates NBCU-branded interactive games and digital content for mobile devices, PCs and gaming consoles.

He comes to NBCUniversal after working as senior VP and GM of Disney’s games and apps division. Before that, Heatherly was senior VP and GM of Disney Interactive’s kids business.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Developments this week at BuzzFeed, Vice and Spotify underscore the velocity of over-the-top activity and the race to reach young viewers. In the context of Comcast's rationale this month that millennial viewers were tuned to the Olympics via NBC's digital platforms, this week's flurry of OTT programming movement sets the stage for intense competition between new and old media as well as among the corporations that back them.

To be sure, this week's activities were largely structural and conceptual, not surprising for a languid summer week. But collectively, they are a reminder that OTT providers are aggressively going after audiences that cable and other multichannel platforms are losing.

BuzzFeed's plan to reorganize itself into Entertainment and News departments also demonstrates that new media companies are learning lessons from their predecessors. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti compared the split to Ted Turner's creation of TBS and CNN.

“Back in the day, all the big incumbents would criticize CNN and TBS and make fun of them, saying they were never going to make it and that they weren’t legitimate,” Peretti told Vanity Fair. "Ted Turner didn’t care what anyone thought, and he built a news and entertainment empire side by side.”

In his memo to staff explaining the restructuring, Peretti said the company cannot organize "around a format or technology."  He said that going forward, the BuzzFeed ventures should "take full advantage of many formats and technologies."

"Having a single 'video department' in 2016 makes about as much sense as having a 'mobile department,'" Peretti said. "As digital video becomes ubiquitous, every major initiative at BuzzFeed around the world will find an expression as video, just like everything we do works on mobile and social platforms."

Under the new structure, the newly created BuzzFeed Entertainment group, headed by current BuzzFeed Motion Pictures president Ze Frank, will include video, lists, quizzes and micro-content. BuzzFeed News, under editor-in-chief Ben Smith, will handle global news, health and video news.

NBCUniversal invested $200 million into BuzzFeed last year, a reminder that old media recognizes where its viewers are heading.

At Vice, the signs of change are more speculative, fueled in part by some raucous remarks this week by CEO Shane Smith and a Wall Street Journal report that The Walt Disney Co. may acquire the 82 percent of Vice that it doesn’t already own. Disney pumped $200 million into Vice last December.

Prior to delivering the prestigious MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival on Wednesday (Aug. 24), Smith told reporters that it makes sense to sell Vice while it is at “the peak of media valuations.” But he added that Disney has not yet made an offer. The WSJ report put Vice's current valuation at nearly $4.5 billion. Smith suggested that Vice could be worth $50 billion in three or four years.

“If you look at the brands like Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars that have [sold] to Disney, they have all gotten bigger,” Shane was quoted as saying in the WSJ.

On a more mundane level, Spotify -- known for its music dominance -- last week fulfilled its May promise to move into the video realm with original programming. Its first documentary series, Metallica: The Early Years, debuted last weekend. Chapter One (about 8 minutes long) includes exclusive interviews with the band plus archival footage. It was available on YouTube; the next three Metallica segments are available only on the mobile version of Spotify’s app.

Spotify's Landmark series of video music stories will continue with a series on the Beach Boys’s iconic Pet Sounds album.

Dragon drama Game of Thrones averaged 25.1 million viewers across the various platforms in its just completed season six, HBO said, up nearly 5 million from the average 20.2 million that watched season five.

HBO came up with that figure when combining linear plays with those on a DVR, on demand and on HBO Go and HBO Now. The digital platforms represent almost 40% of total viewing this season, the network said.

Game of Thrones, showered with 23 Emmy nominations last week, is the most watched HBO series on record, according to the network.

“These record audiences reflect the options we have built into our business model over the last few years. Combining the convenience of HBO On Demand and HBO Go with the subscription flexibility of HBO Now, our programming is being exposed to an ever-growing audience,” said Richard Plepler, chairman and CEO, HBO.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

TLC outlined on Tuesday (March 31) a new programming lineup built around series featuring style makeovers, weddings, families and what the network characterized as "milestone moments."

Follow those themes in order, and it could be a conventional recipe for success, at least in the eyes of TLC viewers, who the network "affectionately" called "heart seekers."

"[They] come to us for a sense of community – to share their own lives and the real lives of the people on TLC," Nancy Daniels, TLC general manager, said.

The network touted its viewers' engagement with programming between seasons via social media and Web platforms, citing its ranking among the top 5 most social cable networks for reality programming in 2014 (per Nielsen Social, ranked by unique authors) and a 267% increase in average monthly engaged users on its Facebook pages from 2013 to 2014 (per Facebook Insights).

In the offing this year for viewers to engage with are more than 50 new and returning series, comprising more than 500 hours of original programming, TLC said.

Adding to its roster of shows about unconventional families, established by 19 Kids and Counting (the Duggars), Little People, Big World and the departed Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, TLC has slated two new entries for for the third quarter: Hardly Royal (working title), about blue-collar car repair advisor David Drew and his family after he discovers "he is heir and rightful King of the Isle of Mann in the United Kingdom"; and Quinceañera (w.t.), about two cousins who are Miami's premiere party planners and dress shop owners serving that momentous Latin American cultural tradition.

A TLC spokesperson confirmed that the previously announced series All That Jazz about transgender teen activist Jazz Jennings and her family remains on track to premiere this summer.

Other family-themed shows on tap this year include Long Lost Family, reuniting separated family members, which premieres this quarter, and I Got You Babies (w.t.), a docu-series scheduled for first-quarter 2016 that will track four sets of first-time parents over the course of their child's first year.

In the style and weddings category, TLC announced makeover series Dare to Wear and Brides Gone Styled, both coming in the second quarter; and #SaveMyStyle (w.t.) and Swipe Right (w.t.), which adds a digital dating twist to the format, both scheduled for Q3. Additionally, the self-explanatory Extreme Dream Weddings premieres in Q3.

TLC's "milestone moments" programming essentially covers dating and marriage. The network characterized two of them as "a new social experiment": Marriage Pact (w.t.), which explores whether marital success increases when you marry your best friend or friend with benefits, and Married by Mom and Dad (w.t.), about couples matched for marriage by their parents (Q4).

Also scheduled for Q3 in the milestone moments of dating genre is 3 Bad Dates, 1 Soul Mate, which "recreates the dating misadventures of two women whose love lives play out like Hollywood rom coms," TLC said.