Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith at the team’s practice facility in Salt Lake City.
Photographer: Michael Friberg for Bloomberg BusinessweekThe Utah Jazz Enter Their Experimental Post-Cable Phase
With its regional sports network shuttered, the team has taken charge of its broadcasts. The rest of the NBA—as well as baseball and hockey—is watching.
In June the Utah Jazz announced that they were quitting cable. For most of the past two decades, the team had telecast its games on a regional sports network, or RSN. It was, while it lasted, a lucrative arrangement. Beginning with several dozen games per year in 2004 and moving to an exclusive agreement for local telecasts in 2009, the Jazz sold their rights to a network that, after several ownership and branding shuffles, came to be known as AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain. In the final year, the network was paying about $25 million per season.
The team used the money to help pay for the talent that fans tuned in to see. In 2020 the Jazz gave 7-foot-1 All-Star center Rudy Gobert, who’s since moved on to the Minnesota Timberwolves, a five-year, $205 million contract extension. The network, in turn, used the programming to drive negotiations with pay-TV providers, who paid a monthly fee for every household that had the channel as part of a satellite or cable package. And carriers, for their part, passed along the fees to subscribers in their monthly bills. Everybody won—especially Gobert.