A lot has been made of the Chicago Cubs’ plans to launch a streaming service in partnership with Sinclair Broadcasting, which co-owns Marquee Sports with the team. On Wednesday, Laurence Holmes welcomed Chicago Sun Times Deputy Sports Editor Jeff Agrest to his show on 670 The Score to talk about the plan and just how quickly it may come to fruition.
The team cannot just flip a switch and launch a streaming version of Marquee Sports. Carriage agreements with the cable and satellite companies that distribute Marquee would have to be renegotiated.
Agrest said he has had trouble determining if the Cubs really do have total control of their streaming rights. If they don’t, it could really slow down their plans.
“MLB could say ‘we’re not giving you the streaming rights’ even though there are 4 teams in baseball whose rights belong to Sinclair or Bally Sports Network now,” Agrest said. “Look, they run the league, so I imagine there’s something they could do to get in the way of this. But if the Cubs have them now, it would be tricky for MLB to get in their way.”
Agrest said that streaming is “still a new frontier for sports,” but teams in all leagues know they have a product that advertisers value.
“They see what the distribution of their games gets them. We see the billions of dollars the NFL gets. They know their value. Baseball teams are in a unique position because they have the most inventory.”
The rumored price point is going to turn a lot of people off from a Cubs streaming service according to Jeff Agrest. At $18 per month, the cost will reportedly be higher than the Disney bundle of Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu.
That already causes alarm, but Agrest says that it doesn’t even really paint an accurate picture of what customers are being asked to shell out. In fact, he isn’t even sure the math works out as well for Marquee as it would for another regional sports network in the market.
“It can’t really be a monthly charge, because no one is going to want to pay for it in December, in January. It’s gonna have to be a yearly charge and that is going to change the mathematics of it,” he said. “The churn rate is going to be enormous for that type of product because it’s not a full season. Marquee has one team, whereas if you’re NBC Sports Chicago and you get to that point, and they will at some point, you at least have three teams and you can go year-round.”
