As NBA season begins, so does NBA TV’s new focus

Bryan Perez started preparing for the 2008-09 NBA basketball season before the teams did.

He was hired in July as the new senior vice president and general manager of NBA Digital, a division of Turner Sports. Since that time, Perez has hired 200 people, helped build a flashy 5,000-square-foot set for the NBA TV channel and steered a redesign of NBA.com that’s centered around streaming video and other multimedia applications.

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HYOSUB SHIN / hshin@ajc.com

Bryan Perez is senior vice president and general manager of NBA Digital, a division of Turner Sports.

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HYOSUB SHIN / hshin@ajc.com

NBA TV’s new set includes a basketball court for analysts’ demonstrations of strategy and a desk for live and breaking news streamed to NBA.com.

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It’s all part of an eight-year deal between Turner Sports, a division of Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting System, and the National Basketball Association announced in January. The deal lets Turner handle the production, advertising sales and marketing for about 50 league and team Web sites, mobile phone applications and packages of NBA and WNBA games and other programs for NBA TV, available on digital sports tiers.

“We want to tell stories across all platforms,” said Perez, who moved to Atlanta from Los Angeles where he started the digital division of Live Nation, the music concert production giant. His handiwork will be evident Tuesday, the tip-off of the season.

Studio B at Turner’s Midtown headquarters is the home of NBA TV’s new set, which includes a basketball court for analysts’ demonstrations of strategy and a desk for live and breaking news streamed to NBA.com. Programming blocks on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights are built around themes as part of Turner’s strategy to get more people watching.

Starting this week, fans will dictate which game NBA TV airs nationally on Tuesdays by voting on NBA.com a week in advance.

On Wednesdays, the network will air original programming such as a commentators roundtable and news features. Thursdays are “Legends Night,” showcasing historic games, players or a team’s rise to fame.

“We want to increase the amount of viewership on NBA TV, that’s why we moved to start ‘theme nights,’” Perez said. “We want to make it a daily destination,” he said.

About 200 people work for NBA Digital — most are based in Atlanta, but some work in New York and New Jersey. Perez said he’s not finished hiring yet, saying he plans to add another “couple dozen people.”

“We were really happy we were able to hire out of the Atlanta market,” he said.

Turner’s 25-year relationship with the NBA has produced staples such as TNT’s “Inside the NBA,” with host Ernie Johnson Jr. and former NBA star-turned-analyst Charles Barkley.

The NBA is the latest major sports brand Turner has added to its growing digital portfolio, which includes PGAtour.com, PGA.com and NASCAR.com. Turner also manages the online advertising sales for the NBA, golf and NASCAR pages of Yahoo Sports as part of a long-term agreement the companies announced in July.

Turner Sports President David Levy said Turner can take advantage of selling advertising across each type of media. For example, he said, an advertiser that wants to be featured during an NBA game can have those ads appear online and be sent to mobile phones simultaneously, he said.

What’s more, Turner can also funnel those ads to its other sports Web sites or the sites that fall under Turner Entertainment Networks, such as Cartoon Network’s adultswim.com, for example.

“So you can do this within the NBA portfolio but also across all of our different brands,” Levy said. “That’s unique to our industry.”

Media consultant Neal Pilson said Turner simply recognizes that there’s money to be made from beefing up its digital media side.

“They have identified the digital platform as a significant revenue opportunity for both the leagues and, of course for Turner, as we look down the road,” said Pilson, former president of CBS Sports who now runs his own media consultant firm in Chappaqua, N.Y.

Pilson said he recently met with Levy to discuss using an Australian-based company that inserts advertising into on-demand programming. Pilson said the company would “help (Turner) maximize the opportunities from digital rights.”