Curious Hair wrote:
Curious Hair wrote:
Spitballin' here:
The NHL's ESPN deal, also includes farming out the old out-of-market package to ESPN+, runs through 2029. The Rogers deal for Canadian TV expires in 2026, and they've already begun subcontracting out their Monday night games to Prime Video. I think the NHL will follow the lead of MLS and sell a leaguewide streaming contract: MLS is on Apple TV+, so I could see the NHL going to Prime. This would mean the end of territorial restrictions and the beginning of everything being available to everyone for a price. The Chicago Sports Network and the OTA/DTC models elsewhere around the league are likely just a stopgap until the league can get the big enchilada. Sure, the CBC and an American network will get their little cutouts, but you gotta believe that's the eventual goal.
Said this about hockey but it seems to be the case for baseball, too. Just gotta mark time until 2028 and then it's going to be a whole paradigm shift of how baseball is televised.
Quote:
2028 is the year where MLB commissioner Rob Manfred would like to reorganize the entire structure of the league’s local media rights deals.
Manfred’s goal is to coalesce enough MLB clubs to sell a package of local media rights to a tech company like Amazon or Google. The proposed system would, in theory, end blackouts and simplify the experience for fans, creating a one-stop-shop for local MLB broadcasts and eliminating the need for a pay TV subscription.
For small and medium-market teams, the arrangement is a no-brainer. These teams will likely attract larger fees from a nationalized local rights deal than they would from declining regional sports networks, many of which have already slashed local rights payments just to stay solvent.
For large-market teams, however, the decision to align with Manfred’s grand plan is much more difficult. Teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees have highly lucrative local rights deals already, and would likely need financial incentive to ditch their current arrangements to join onto a nationalized local rights deal. Of course, a bundle of local rights is only so attractive if it’s without MLB’s highest-drawing franchises.
But according to John Ourand of Puck, at least one big-market team seems to be on board with MLB’s local media rights plan. San Francisco Giants CEO Larry Baer told Ourand last week that the team is “very open” to bundling its local rights with other franchises to sell to a national streaming platform. Baer added that “most teams are very open” to the idea as well.
That’s an encouraging sign for Manfred, who will have a tough job when it comes to convincing teams like the Giants to get in line.
The Giants own about one-third of their regional sports network, NBC Sports Bay Area, which recently began making its games available to stream on Peacock.
There’s still a few years until Manfred will need firm commitments from teams, but the more ball clubs like the Giants that he can get on board, the more valuable the totality of the league’s local media rights package will become.
I have a lot of reservations about this. I think baseball is particularly ill-suited to streaming: maybe it's just me, but putting on an Amazon Prime NFL game feels like a whole endeavor that I have to commit to and sit down for instead of just putting on the cable channel that a Cubs game is on, and that doesn't really mesh with the ambient, life wallpaper that I associate with baseball. But it's really the only way. Linear cable TV feels like it's dying the way that all media dies: slowly, then all at once. There's no more money in that, and they can't just give the games away over the air when bad baseball players make $10 million a year. And the idea of watching an RSN for anything other than local games is at this point just bizarre. Marquee is bleak enough; I don't even want to know how they fill the hours on a Cleveland channel.
Gonna be tough to sell bundled local rights without the Dodgers, Blue Jays, and the whole Northeast, who would surely opt out. Losing territorial restrictions will be good, especially for poor old Iowa, but paywalling baseball still feels dangerous to me.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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Curious is correct, MLB (and the NHL) do not translate to streaming very well in terms of quality. Unfortunately, it's the only option. Subscriptions like Cable are dying.