The NBA is rolling out a newly redesigned app Tuesday that it hopes will become a one-stop shop for its fans and serve as its digital flagship.
The NBA App, which took more than two-and-a-half years to design and finish, will serve as a portal to League Pass and NBA TV, and as a store for short- and long-form content. In creation and in its effect, it has the look and feel at times of the NBA’s attempt at making a social media app for its fans, with vertical content and an interface that mimics the ones seen on Instagram and TikTok.
The NBA debuts at the same time as the league has made other changes to its digital offerings. It drastically lowered the price of NBA League Pass this season, down over 50 percent to $99.99. It also cut down on the latency between live games and the broadcasts on League Pass by half, promising a faster and higher quality feed.
The league began working on the app shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, seeing a change in media and viewership trends and those have only been heightened since then.
“The way people were consuming content and their expectation was different,” Christopher Benyarko, the NBA’s EVP of Direct-to-Consumer, said. “So there’s an expectation that it’s personalized. There is an expectation that if they want to go deep they can. There’s also an expectation that there’s limited friction, and not a lot of search. Just deliver it to me. There’s a lot of consumed passive, not a lot of searching (and) going to find. And so we said we really need to make an investment to do that. So we made that decision pre-pandemic.
“The pandemic happened and one of the things that came up even as we went through that it was like we don’t have a direct relationship with all of our subscribers. We don’t know a lot about what they want.
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