The 1st NBA Playoffs of the $76B era

How Peacock, Prime Video and ESPN showed up on CTV for the occasion.

May 26, 2026

The 2026 NBA Playoffs mark the first post season to run under the new eleven-year, $76 billion media rights deal the league signed in July 2024. NBC/Peacock is back covering NBA basketball for the first time since 2002. Amazon Prime Video is in for the first time ever. ABC/ESPN renewed while Warner Bros Discovery (TNT Sports) is out.

For our newest edition of Above the Fold with Looper Insights, we collected data for the first half of the playoff window, from 14 to 30 April across US CTV environments (Fire TV, Apple TV, PS5, Samsung TV (2022), Xfinity, PS4, Xumo Comcast, Sony TV (2019), Apple iPhone, Xumo Charter), to capture how the three streamers promoted the games they had, who showed up loudest, who chose which tactic and what else they could have done.

Today at a glance

Peacock made the comeback hard to miss
Prime Video bet on marquee
ESPN took the flexible route
The tactic everyone left on the table

Peacock made the comeback hard to miss

NBC last carried the NBA in 2002. How did they do this year? They’re happy and call it a triumph. NBC Sports will present up to 41 games of live coverage throughout the First Round and Conference Semifinals, as well as exclusive coverage of the entire Western Conference Finals.

Peacock chose to have presence across multiple environments rather than depend on a single hero unit. The result is the broadest sustained CTV footprint ($MPV™) of any streamer in the window we studied.

Now the focus on bundles was an interesting move and reads as a broadcaster reasserting itself in a category it has not held in a while. Within Prime Video, Peacock surfaced inside a co-branded placement that paired its NBA Playoffs coverage with Apple TV’s Friday Night Baseball under a single Bundle and Save offer. The placement traded scale for context, reaching users already in a live sports mindset and giving them a value proposition tied to two live rights properties at once.

Prime Video bet on marquee

Amazon has never carried NBA games before this season. The new deal gives Prime Video 66 regular-season games and a share of the playoff games. Their home screen approach is about specificity.

The representative Prime Video placement anchors the playoff window around a named matchup and an “It’s on Prime” lockup. The Watch Now CTA sits directly under the matchup card. There is no abstract bracket motif and no generic “the playoffs are here” framing.

With multiple games happening every week across all broadcasters, this is the tactic to adopt to grab viewers’ attention and take action right away on the games you own. The placement also promotes frictionless access with the “It’s on Prime”. The route to the live game is direct.

ESPN took the flexible route

ABC and ESPN are entering their 24th consecutive season as NBA rights holders. The renewal also keeps the NBA Finals on ESPN as an exclusive during ten of the eleven years of the deal.

The tactical home screen choice reflects that position. The representative ESPN placement surfaces through Sling with high-energy basketball imagery, a “Flex with the Playoffs” headline and a $4.99 per day access price baked into the creative. The CTA reads Watch Live. The framing centres on flexibility and access, with the exclusivity messaging held in reserve for the part of the post season ESPN does not have to share.

The access angle introduces some friction at the entry point because the daily price tag sits inside the placement itself.

The tactic everyone left on the table

Three positions in the deal produced three tactical answers. Prime Video built its creative around specific matchups and named players. ESPN built its creative around daily pricing and flexibility. Peacock layered both and added a third play the other two did not run: the bundle.

One tactical move from a comparable live sports window did not show up in the first half of the NBA Playoffs. March Madness creative across leading streamers led with bold NOW STREAMING treatments at the point of entry, prominent LIVE flags and explicit date callouts inside the placement itself. The placements were built to communicate live availability before the viewer registered anything else.

NBA Playoffs creative carried Watch Now and Watch Live CTAs but they sat smaller and were out-shouted by matchup naming, access pricing and bundle messaging. The live cue became one element in the placement rather than the headline of the placement. It is the easiest creative fix available to any of the three streamers for the remainder of this season and for the upcoming ten seasons the trio will share.

Get the full picture 👇🏻

The Top 3 streamer rankings by $MPV™: where NBC/Peacock, Prime Video and ESPN landed on dollar value, total visibility and impressions during the opening weeks of the playoff window sits inside the Looper Insights report.