Unlocking the Business of Basketball_ NBA Africa’s Expansion, Media Rights & Global Reach

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
He says, your husband was up at three in the morning watching NBA. I'm gonna tell you something. That was me last night. It'll probably be me tonight. New York is playing tonight. But it got me to thinking about media rights and revenue streams. And so for the BAL, is there a Nick fan?
Is it a traditional model where it's media rights, it's merchandising, it's tourism? How is it structured here and what's the plan for scalability for that?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:32)
Thank you. So mainly four ways that leagues like ours can monetize. And I think the more common one for African, for our league is sponsorship and marketing partnerships.
And that's where you see some of the partnerships we have here, ServiceNow, VisitRender, Afrik Zimbabwe and Render. So yes, sponsorship and marketing rights and using our platform that we give to market products and services.
We have overall NB as over one billion funds. Within Africa, we have millions. We have 1.2 billion impressions in the last season. And when you look at our social media platforms, we have a big reach. So that reach allows partners like ours to really access the funds that we have. And that's how we monetize one way. The other one is merchandise. And good news is that we just opened an e-commerce portal. It's called balstore.nba.com, where you can buy merchandise from anywhere using our e-commerce platform. Now, we know that the market, not just in Africa, but also especially the African diaspora, all over the world has been looking to own something with BAL whenever they interact with it. We saw pictures last year of season four with a family in Brazil working around with BAL. And we wondered where they got the BAL merchandise.
We've seen pictures in Heathrow where people crossing security and they're wearing BAL.
And those anecdotes showed us that there's really appetite for consuming BAL beyond the African market, but also with especially the African diaspora all over the world who are really big. In fact, one of the statistics that a colleague of mine shared with me is if you take out China and India, the African diaspora is the third country in terms of population globally. So interacting with that market as part of what we have to offer as BAL continues to be important for us.
The third one is ticketing. You know, when you come to watch games, every year we see ticketing revenues go up because more and more fans are coming to watch our games and paying to watch our games, and that has been really important as well. Now the media market, obviously as well, is a big part of sports leagues. It's a growing aspect in Africa, whether it's pay TV, it's still very limited in terms of the coverage, free-to-air, many of the free-to-air broadcasters are national and therefore kind of free access in the countries where they serve. But we see that changing. I think when you say what does the future look like, one of the areas we see the future changing is very much around what Luol talked about, which is integrating markets in Africa. I think the more integrated markets are, the more integrated services are, the more integrated we can be, the more you can actually use platforms to provide, whether it's streaming or broadcasting to markets across the continent. Now, people like to say we need to integrate Africa more and we really need to. We talked about the African continent, a free trade area. It's a big aspiration to really break down all these barriers, so we can trade as one market. But a lot has to be done for that to happen. And I think we will touch on a couple of those. How do you adjust a business in Rwanda and be able to give your services across the 54 countries? That's not happening yet today. How do you get a license to broadcast in one country and broadcast in many countries, so you can actually access a much bigger market on the continent? Those kinds of things need to be solved so that we can actually provide services across the continent. The good news, I think, especially for media rights, is what we see in some of what the telcos are doing. If you give an example of MTN, 300 million subscribers across the continent, I know that they're thinking about using that platform that already is connected by subscription all over the continent to provide content such as content that we would be interested in. So I think that's going to change and I think we're going to see more access to media, more media integration and media contributing a lot more than we're seeing today, and for me, the future is bright.