Chinese Internet giant Tencent has signed a five-year (2020-2025) extension to its existing deal (2015-2020) with NBA as the exclusive official digital partner in China, multiple sources have confirmed to Lanxiong Sports.

The new deal is approximately worth $1.5 billion, which is 3 times as the previous contract, said sources briefed on the details of the agreement. 

The negotiation between Tencent and NBA started from last year but no final agreements were reached within the exclusive negotiation window period, which ended in April 2019. Then Alibaba, another Chinese Internet giant, came into the battlefield to compete for the exclusive NBA media rights. 

Lanxiong Sports learned that NBA China submitted the two scenarios offered by Tencent and Alibaba to the NBA last week, and NBA called a conference immediately for this issue. Both Chinese companies offered a similar amount of money in order to land the deal. A few days later, NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, eventually selected their former partner Tencent.

Besides, Lanxiong Sports has also learned that in the extension negotiations, Tencent previously hopes to get the whole exclusive rights of digital media in the next five-year cycle, which means that Tencent is the only partner on all kinds of digital media distribution channels, such as PC, mobile, social media, OTT and mobile news aggregation platform. By investing billions of dollars on NBA media rights, Tencent naturally want to concentrate all the NBA video resources to its own channels without any diversion, to maximize the revenue scale of paid users.

About Lanxiong Sports:

Lanxiong Sports is the first sports business content provider in China. And has become the first multi-service platform of the Chinese sports industry. They are committed to connect top resources efficiently in the sports industry. 

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