AT&T SportsNet — the regional sports network brand owned by Warner Bros. Discovery — will cease operations in the coming weeks, leaving several professional sports franchises wondering where their games will be broadcast in the future. In Pittsburgh, one of the markets affected by the shutdown, 93.7 The Fan afternoon host Andrew Fillipponi wondered if a similar concept to that in New York could work.
Yesterday, MSG Networks announced it will launch a streaming service — MSG+ — in a direct-to-consumer model. The subscription will cost $29.99 per month or $309.99 for the calendar year. MSG will also offer pay-per-view broadcasts of individual games for $9.99, which Fillipponi questioned as the potential future for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Penguins.
“I’m not saying it will happen, I’m not saying it won’t happen, I think it’s possible something like this happens to the Pirates and Penguins starting next month,” Fillipponi said. “They don’t have a channel. If you want to watch the game, you go to the Pirates app or the Penguins app, you pay $9.99 a game, or X amount dollars a month, or Y amount of dollars for the entire year.
“If that happens, I wonder what kind of appetite sports fans in Pittsburgh will have for something like that. At the end of March, there are still — at that point — a half dozen or so Penguins games on the schedule that could determine what happens to them if they make the playoffs or not. Would you pay $9.99 a game to watch those games?… These are legitimate questions…because if the higher-ups at the Pirates and Penguins aren’t asking these hypothetical questions and then trying to do market research on it, then they’re not really that smart.”
Fillipponi continued by saying the two franchises have plenty of ideas to brainstorm.
“These are the types of things they should be exploring right now. This is ‘No idea is a bad idea’ time of season. The channel that airs our games is going bankrupt. It’s going bye-bye. It’s gone. It’s gonna disappear. How do we wanna get our games out there? How are people gonna watch us? $9.99 per Penguins game. Would you pay that? $10 a game? $30 a month? Hundreds of dollars for the season?”
