The NBA is tripling its Snapchat output for the 2016-17 season
The National Basketball League is bringing more shots to Snapchat.
The league and Snap have renewed a partnership to bring behind-the-scenes and in-game coverage to the app. They are expected to triple the amount of content compared to last year, when Snapchat hosted Live Stories and curated collections of snaps from fans and teams for games each week, as well as for events like the All-Star game and NBA Finals.
For the 2016-17 NBA season, the league will create more Live Stories and release a weekly Discover channel. The NBA is only the second sports league -- after the National Football League -- to boast an exclusive Discover channel, which grants them access to more storytelling features.
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The first Discover edition launches Tuesday for the season opener. There will also be a Live Story featuring footage from Kevin Durant's debut on the Golden State Warriors and the ring ceremony for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Fans attending games this season will be able to access NBA-themed lenses and Bitmoji -- a first-time partnership for a sports league and Bitmoji.
Snapchat users can also access scoreboard geofilters that update in near real-time with the current scores. Those dynamic filters generated 20 million views over 51 games last NBA season, TechCrunch reported.
For the NBA, this season's effort with Snapchat requires substantially more investment. But it also provides an additional revenue stream and potentially more attention from Snapchat's growing userbase of 150 million daily active users.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Snapchat will have access to the ad sales inventory and could choose to split the revenue or pay a licensing fee, as Recode previously reported. The NBA declined to comment on the arrangement.
"We’re seeing tremendous engagement with a young, global audience on the platform," Melissa Rosenthal Brenner, the NBA's senior vice president of digital media, wrote to Mashable in an email. "Without getting into specifics, we’re committed to providing enough resources [to Discover] to do this right and provide our fans with a unique experience."
For Snapchat, the deal with the NBA is just its latest move to bring more TV-like content to its app. Snapchat has partnered with nearly every major sports league in the United States, including the NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB, PGA and NASCAR.
Topics Snapchat
Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
