Soon after Brian Roberts‘ surprising and carefully crafted decision to bid $2.5 billion a year for NBA rights – a figure that surpassed its competitors, Warner Bros. Discovery and CEO David Zaslavout of the water—the media story quickly turned to how the league could help Peacock and cleverly amortize itself over two big weekly primetime windows at NBC. But media veterans, who know the Comcast CEO is a savvy negotiator and a profit-and-loss viper, also assumed Comcast and NBCU would use the rights package as leverage in subsequent negotiations with partners and distributors.

Loyal readers will even remember when I broke the news that part of Comcast’s NBA deal thesis was that they could ultimately punish WBD in future negotiations by lowering the carriage fees for TNT. WBD’s Turner Networks contracts with Comcast expire at the end of next year. With the NBA, TNT currently costs Comcast about $3 per subscriber per month. Without the NBA, Comcast will push to pay a much lower fee. As the analyst Michael Nathanson told me earlier this week, “Sure, TNT has March Madness and the baseball playoffs, but that’s really rerun television. Why does TNT cost $3 a month when USA costs 50 cents or AMC costs $1?”