OT: More RSN troubles; Bally's loses rights to broadcast Padres after missed payment
Bally's parent company Diamond Sports is in chapter 11 bankruptcy and had missed a payment to MLB for broadcast rights for Padres games. Starting today games will be produced by MLB and distributed on local cable networks and for free at MLB.com and on their app.
MLB statement includes this interesting bit: (emphasis mine)
“While we’re disappointed that Diamond Sports Group failed to live up to their contractual agreement with the club, we are taking this opportunity to reimagine the distribution model, remove blackouts on local games, improve the telecast, and expand the reach of Padres games by more than 2 million homes,"
My fear/expectation is that, as cable package subscriptions fall, the RSN model becomes more and more unsustainable and the leagues shift to a separate subscription service, making the cost for receiving live sports broadcasts/streams go up.
https://apnews.com/article/padres-bally-sports-mlb-906f9f1ad0d66264b92b9cbe0ecd888a
‘member the days of watching your local team on the local station and it didnt cost anything?
Like when Bernie Smilovic would throw it up to George and Al in the booth?
Those two voices were a major soundtrack to a lot of summers.
If Ernie Harwell were still calling Tigers games on the radio, I wouldn't give a damn about the state of TV broadcasts.
If Kell and Kaline were calling Tiger games on TV, I'd pay to watch it.
It would be very cool if Keith Jackson would team up with Kell and Kaline to announce a game or two. Make this happen, Detroit Tigers!
damn, that's good stuff. I was 12 that summer, perfect.
me, pretending to be mgrow old:
2. it would seem that the more they restrict the viewing of these sports, the less viewers, leading to less fans, leading to less money, leading to less players coming up through the system all the way down to little leagues, etc. risking pricing themselves out of business. i have to think that the NHL model of the last few years on some whack network hurt them badly in terms of viewship. nice to see them on normal networks, but i'd say that's not an outlier about pricing and subscriptions for specific teams or even sports.
Harumph! That old guy guy can't even cough up a single dollar to pay off his lost bets. 😉
I still have it in escrow and will pay up when I'm absolutely sure Harbaugh is coaching next year.
On one hand:
- All NFL vacancies filled
- Strong recruiting class coming in
- Best roster since God knows when
- Great, young assistants in place
- Spring practice behind us
- 0.0 chatter in the rumor mill of him going anywhere
- Great relationship with new UM president
On the other hand:
- Warde
So as far as I'm concerned that dollar is still very much up for grabs.
Standing by. (And. How are you doing with the replacement body part? You okay?)
So far, so good (although today is NOT a good day for whatever reason).
The challenge one faces is everyone in the medical community urges you to stay active, engage in your physical therapy and generally push yourself to help in the recovery.
Then if you start feeling pain again (like I am today) the response is always "you overdid it, you need to talk it easy". So I'm not entirely sure exactly where the middle ground lies.
Thank you for asking.
Sorry to hear you needed replacement surgery. Best wishes on your recovery.
On the upside, you get to tell everyone you're a cyborg.
I remember the days of PASS sports (which my parents wouldn't purchase) and being able to watch more Chicago Bulls games living in Detroit than Pistons games. I'm not sure what percentage of Pistons/Tigers/Wings games were actually available on free network TV. I do know that in order to watch the Lions we had to occasionally find bars that had the games due to the leagues local blackout rules for non sell out games. The more things change...
IIRC there was a time when PASS had half the Pistons & Wings games, Ch 50 the other half.
I don't really, because my parents wouldn't pay for PASS Sports when I was a kid. I had to listen to the Red Wings on the radio.
In days of yore, Tigers games were on channel 4 over air (channel 2 when I was really young with George Kell and Ray Lane). Not all, mind you. I'd say 2-4 a week depending on the schedule. Select Wings games were on channel 50 so all you needed was a decent antenna for free local sports (though not all games).
Yes, I look at an actuary table and say, "Uh oh."
'member when the Tigers would win lots of games?
I remember warm summer evenings listening to the Tigers on the radio with my grandpa. Windows open on his farm. Crickets and frogs chiping outside, while Ernie Harwell called the game.
All games for teams who play in publicly-funded stadiums should be available over the air.
You’re goddamn right
Based on that, shouldn’t they also be free to attend then, too?
Why? ESPN broadcasts games from stadiums all over that you can't watch unless you have ESPN. The content inside a stadium or arena has licensing rights with very different rules. Would you say the same for every concert, trade show, and ice capades that comes through? Also, publicly-funded is very broad. Sometimes it will be a county, sometimes hotel taxes, sometimes land grants, sometimes it will be a public-private partnership. TV/internet broadcasting is very different from building and maintaining a multipurpose stadium and I don't think you can link the two as they both continue to evolve beyond what they were 20-30 years ago.
You have to remember - we are heading into the time when stadiums will get smaller and more exclusive (higher ticket prices) but anyone will be able to "watch" virtually from any seat in the building through a VR. Very different demands technologically and commercially.
making the cost go up? Bally is charging $20/month to stream Tigers games. Compared to almost any other streaming service, it's priced outrageously.
I agree - that monthly cost is ridiculous.
I live in SE Michigan and Bally's is part of my base cable package. In that sense, it's "free" to me. (no incremental cost, as I'd have the cable subscription with or without Bally)
I'm worried that when MLB, "reimagine(s) the distribution model," it will require me to pay some incremental cost. And there's no way I'm shelling out $20/month.
FSD used to be included on YouTubeTV, Hulu and a few other streaming services. When they changed hands they had this genius idea to price those packages out in favor of starting up their own. I think that's what did them in. Instead of it being part of the paid packages on existing platforms, they lost like half of their customers in a single decision and probably very few switched over to their subscription service.
YouTubeTV is like $70/month in total. There's no way someone can legitimately argue that streaming Tigers, Pistons and Red Wings games (or the local equivalent elsewhere) is worth 28% of the price and equivalent content to an entire TV package.
This is a holdover from cable, where the sports channels were worth a lot more than 28% of revenue because a large chunk of the audience actually watched commercials on sports channels and not so much elsewhere. Yes, some people will DVR sports, but watching sports live is part of the appeal.
Count me in the group that balked at $20 month and dropped out. It should also be noted that Wings, Tigers and Pistons are all currently in extended “rebuilds” / suck.
When the Pistons were rebuilding with Zeke and the Pukester, they did some great promotions to generate interest in the team. Fill up with Marathon gas, get free Pistons tickets, for example. It was the only way this broke college student was going to see Larry Legend’s Celts and Dr. J’s 76ers (with 40,000 of my closest friends) at the Silverdome. Tom Wilson was a genius.
Comment duplicated.
Ending blackout restrictions on local games would be huge for me. Where I live, I literally do not know of a way for me to get Tigers games. I cant even pay for the mlb package, as I am about 10 miles within the radius to be considered "local", but I dont have the option to get Bally Detroit on my cable package.
Here's hoping to it getting fixed.
Yep, Padres fans will now be able to stream Padres games no matter where they live. Tigers fans should be wishing for this same deal to come to them.
A VPN doesn't get you around that?
Ugh - that's brutal!
Maybe we'll all be snapping these up from eBay and tuning in to DD in the near future:
Wow, just one payment? Media lives in a world of their own.
Rest of us live in a world where most businesses pay as late as possible. If you cut one over a single late payment, you'd run out of clients. And if you don't live in this world, based on how the media falls over itself to cover big names with glowing portrayals, you might think the largest corporations are the upstanding citizens of the business world and the small businesses are delinquent, but it's the exact opposite. The bigger the business, the more likely they are to pull shenanigans.
Normally I'd agree with you, but when they're in bankruptcy you cut your losses before they mount and get paid out pennies on the dollar.
To be fair, there are a couple more piece of context:
Diamond Sports is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings...
...Diamond Sports missed a rights fees payment to the regional sports network’s parent company and let the grace period expire.
This isn't a "pay as late as possible to maximize our balance sheet" kind of financial shenanigan, this is a "oh crap, we're out of cash" problem.
Between these circumstances and MLB's apparent interest in a distribution model change, it seems there wasn't too much negotiation interest from MLB.
i miss just having the tigers on in the background in the summer, but I refuse to pay $20/month for losing teams. Strike a deal with youtubetv, cowards
Years ago we made the decision to not pay for Tigers TV. Instead we had the radio on every night. Robins chirping good night, cicadas humming and the voices of Dan and Jim wafting through the air like lilac blossoms - that's the sound of summer. Two of my kids are older and have moved away. The 2 still at home know when game time is and will turn on the radio before I can get to it.
BTW - now that Jim Price isn't able to go anymore, the Tigers have tried out a few different color guys. Andy Dirks is, hands down, the best. I thoroughly enjoy the banter between him and Dan. Cameron Maybin and Bobby Scales (a Michigan guy) also had a shot. The problem I had with them was they kept bringing in this baseball-insider dugout lingo, things like "he's a quick 90." You need a decoder ring to understand that means he's real fast from home to first. It makes you feel like an outsider to their exclusive club. Dirks is so unassuming while painting a relatable picture.
Totally agree St. Joe. Andy Dirks is hands down the best color guy they have had in the booth this Spring. He is a natural and there seems to be good chemistry between Dan and him. I hope he gets the gig full time as I really enjoy listening to him.
Part of the issue is Diamond Sports, or Sinclair. Sinclair's plan for the RSNs was doomed from the beginning. Sinclair has little negotiating power as they don't have much of anything to bundle or leverage to force providers to pick up the RSNs. Disney/ESPN can force providers to pick up the ACC Network by negotiating their package as a whole.
But you are correct. The days of non-sports fans subsidizing sports are coming to an end. It is going to become much more expensive to a be sports fan. Will Leitch wrote a good column on this recently (the carriage fees for ESPN are insane):
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/espn-streaming-and-the-rising-cost-of-watching-sports.html
Excellent, insightful article. Thanks.
This tweet from the article is crazy. If this becomes the norm, following your local team as a casual fan will be non-existent unless they are having a really good year. Maybe it forces a few more fans to plan a trip to the ballpark to see the local team, but I think the long term scenario is you won't be developing the next generation of fans.
I have three boys, one of which cares about the local MLB team. I have their games on a couple times a week for a few innings because more times than not, I turn the TV on and it's on the channel that carries almost all of their games. He asked to get a jersey of his favorite player who is not a nationally known player. Moving to a model where I have to subscribe to a, or multiple, service(s) just to watch the local team will not happen. Net result, my one son who used his own money to buy a little known player's jersey, will not know who anyone on the team is.
I would pay $20 a month to be able to stream all of Tigers, RW, Pistons and Lions games but that doesn’t exist as far as I know. Bally where I live gets me Indians (barf), Browns (fun to watch lose I guess; but they’re on local tv anyways), Cavs (barf).
Bally's tried the streaming subscription model(https://www.ballysports.com/packages/), and it failed miserably. Bally Sports+ offers you streaming access for $19.99/month. But there are not enough subscribers to make the model work. Your target audience is tiny (obsessive Detroit sports fans for Bally Sports Detroit for example). I am a big Detroit sports fan compared to the general public, and I haven't missed Bally Sports one iota. Maybe that is partly due to the fact that Detroit teams have been terrible during the last decade, but I don't think that is it.
The problem is I don't think the RSN model is going to win out. Will teams or a league get more revenue from trying to sell 2-3 local baseball, basketball, and/or hockey teams to a very small local audience or would they be better off packaging all their own league games together like the NFL or MLS? There are some differences as the NFL and MLS inventory is different from MLB, but I think there are only a couple MLB teams with fan bases or cities large enough to sell a model like YES network subscriptions.
Can’t wait ‘til their stupid plan fails completely.
The idea that Folks Who Don’t Care About Sports would permanently subsidize the rest of us through cable bundles has been a slow-motion train wreck for a while now. And the sports leagues aren’t suddenly going to forgo that revenue without a fight. That will leave the rest of us holding the bag.
Unless we decide not to and just do something else with our time.