NBA Now Trying Out 99-cent Stream for Final Quarter of a Live Game
The National Basketball Association seems to be taking their on-demand streaming offers one step further, as the league has started to offer a video stream of the deciding fourth quarter for under a dollar.
The NBA App was spotted offering the last quarter of the latest meeting between the Heat and the Thunder for 99 cents. It looks to be a way for the NBA to get into microtransactions for their on-demand streaming offers, as spotted by a Twitter user via The Verge.
"Playoff positioning is on the line! Watch the 4th quarter of Heat Thunder live for just 99 cents on League Pass," the NBA App notification popped up this weekend on Saturday, March 24, as captured in a screenshot by Vasu Kulkarni.
For those who didn't tune in, The Oklahoma City Thunder beat Miami Heat 105 to 99 on the back of another strong performance by Westbrook.
The NBA has long offered a wide range of streaming options for fans, starting from the NBA League Pass that covers the entire season, for all the matches that the league covers. It's a hefty subscription, though, and lately, NBA has partnered with Turner to form NBA Digital to offer things like subscriptions of a single team or the choice to watch just one game in particular.
The NBA has not officially announced this new offer outside of the NBA App for now, as Engadget noted. As it is now, however, it already comes pretty close to NBA commissioner Adam Silver's vision for on-demand viewing in the future.
"I think you're going to get to the point where somebody wants to watch the last five minutes of the game, and they go click, they'll pay a set price for five minutes as opposed to what they would pay for two hours of the game," Silver once said at CES 2016, and now, that future's already here.