Wild times in Colorado and parts nearby. The Rockies hit this week with the regular season just a few days off and a local broadcast deal nowhere in sight.
Enjoy, Rockies fans! This one’s for you — assuming you can find it.
If you’re wondering about the state of baseball on TV, this is it — or at least it’s the very near future, either for the team you love or the team you love to hate. The Rockies’ case may represent an extreme, but nobody should call it an outlier.
The regional sports network (RSN) construct in America is blowing apart. The Rockies’ former local home for game broadcasts, AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain, is a goner, part of a national housecleaning of RSNs by Warner Bros. Discovery after it took over last year.
According to the Denver Post, the Rockies have been looking into partnerships with carriers like Comcast, Dish Network and DirecTV, but as of this writing nothing has materialized. The team opens its regular season Thursday in Arizona, with its home opener in Denver scheduled for a week from Friday.
So what does the landscape look like for Rockies fans who can’t find the games on their local provider?
Pricey, for starters.
Again, this could change. But as of now, the only option is a subscription streaming package cobbled together by Major League Baseball itself, which announced in February it was taking over the production and distribution of the Rockies’ broadcasts.
Good news: You can stream the app without a cable or satellite package.
Bad news: It’ll cost ya. The Rockies.tv app runs $19.99 a month or $99.99 for the year. And since the majority of all content consumers, including baseball fans, remain tethered to some sort of cable/satellite subscription despite reports of increased cord-cutting, that cost will most likely be in addition to what folks are already paying Comcast or whichever carrier they’ve got.
It stinks. But it’s also a glimpse of what MLB thinks could be the longer-term picture for baseball broadcasts.
The Rockies’ case is one of a couple that we might as well call MLB experiments. These were forged by emergency, not design, but the league now controls broadcasts for the Rockies, Padres and Diamondbacks after those teams’ RSN deals fell apart.
There is value to the league in learning how to do this, because with the regional networks continuing to disintegrate, streaming services are going to become a larger and larger component of MLB’s broadcast outreach. And although the Rockies are currently without a local carrier, a streaming-only options is not the model — at least not completely.
The model is actually closer to a hybrid, as The Athletic explained last year. What MLB commissioner Rob Manfred envisions is a short-term future in which carriers like Dish, DirecTV, etc. still offer home-team games through RSNs, for however long those continue to exist. Meanwhile, the league builds up its streaming offerings into something that can hit on both a local and national level.
Imagine a world in which you could choose a league-wide bundle of in-market games, with no blackout restrictions, distributed either directly by MLB or through a partner like Amazon or Apple. You’d also have the ability to buy your home team’s standalone season — or maybe only a month, or perhaps only a particular game you wish to see.
That would be one advantage of an all-in streaming service, and it’s different from what MLB.tv offers now, particularly in the area of local blackouts. As The Athletic’s Evan Drellich notes, MLB is years away from being able to enact such a plan because of the exclusivity clauses built in to several ongoing RSN contracts. But the idea is already taking root.
The league has to figure out how to make a deal work. Any large-scale media partner, Apple and Amazon included, would want the entire MLB package of broadcasts, and that will be a tough sell to owners in places like New York and Los Angeles, which hammer massive profit through their local deals and have deep financial stakes in their RSNs.
But with those regional networks in free-fall, the league may have to move quickly and hope to find its footing along the way. As fans in the Mountain West are discovering, there’s no future in hoping the old methods of seeing games will stay intact.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
