David Zaslav
Analyst · Bank of America Securities.
And remember, there are -- on average, we might be 25% of viewership on any given night. But when -- during the NBA, we could be up to 40% of viewership, live sports, live news, entertainment, nonfiction. During March Madness, our numbers will be even higher. And so the ability to use live news, use -- particularly live sports, which others did with the NFL and college football in -- during a difficult market, but the fact that we're such a big part, an effective part of the overall viewership in America gives us a chance to go to advertisers on digital news, sports, entertainment. And so that opportunity, I think, should give us a huge advantage if and when the market comes back, and we expect it will. We just can't predict when.
Finally, on the distribution side, we did very well at Discovery with our traditional nonfiction package. Turner did very well with their new sports and entertainment. Together, we make up most of the high quality and valuable piece of the basic cable bundle. And so together, we're really aligned with the distributors. They want the bundle to remain robust. We want it to remain robust. And with all the discussion of the decline of the traditional bundle, and we could see that it is in secular decline, but the real optimistic point here is that almost all of the sports, all of the sports are on free-to-air and cable. And the numbers for sports have gone up dramatically. March Madness was up 40%. The NBA is up 25%, 30%.
And so it is the platform where people are watching sports, and that sports is going to be on cable for the next 10 years. And so there are certain trends you see. On the other hand, you see a very big uptick on sport and long-term commitment to sport on the platform, which I think will provide a steadying force. And it'll likely -- when there was some discussion by Rutledge this morning, a great operator, of some challenges ahead, I think one of the things that the operators are concerned about is when it comes to the big 12 and the increase in sports rights that they're going to have to pay the lion's share of that. It increases.