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. So I think you’re going to take the same great content, and you’re just going to make it that much more available to people who want it.”
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The NBA’s Twitter account already regularly uses a #LeaguePassAlert hashtag to inform followers of exciting moments and close finishes. Some users of the NBA app received push notifications alerting them when the fourth quarters of key games were beginning.
#LeaguePassAlert@spurs 108 / @utahjazz 106
38 seconds left in the 4th! pic.twitter.com/z7XX7iCfer
— NBA (@NBA) March 24, 2018
Wow. @NBA experimenting with in app micro-transactions, offering 4th quarter of a game for $0.99. The future is here. pic.twitter.com/pu602ZAokn
— Vasu Kulkarni (@Vasu) March 24, 2018
Twitter has also mused openly about implementing a micropayments system for sports, so it’s easy to foresee a time when the social media platform and other apps offer the service directly. Former product director at Sky Sports, Gareth Capon, wrote on Twitter that his network discussed this concept five years ago, adding that the service “needs to be seamless” such as with one click on a mobile device.