First things first: Bally Sports/Diamond and the folks over at Comcast won’t duke it out forever. After the requisite insult swap, they’ll get back to the negotiating table and, more likely than not, hammer out a new agreement for the Major League Baseball broadcast markets they’ve recently hosed.
The bigger question is, how soon can MLB itself grab the wheel of this careening truck?
On some levels, that’s what the league’s brain trust wants. In a perfect world, MLB would bring almost all of its teams’ broadcasts in house and create a monster streaming package that covers everything. All markets, no blackouts – the works. It’d be a baseball watcher’s dream, and its growth and profitability would be MLB’s exclusive province.
It isn’t going to happen soon, for a number of reasons. But let’s not knock it down completely before we’ve had a chance to peek under the hood.
MLB’s franchise owners, or franchise-owning corporations, have pretty much loved the regional sports network system, because RSNs usually delivered a good payday and a long-term contract – two things most franchises need. But RSNs are totally dependent on delivery methods, and that means they’ve constantly had to juggle deals with various providers: Comcast, of course, but also DirecTV, AT&T, Spectrum, NBC Sports – it basically depends upon where you live and who are the dominant systems in your region.
The system worked until it didn’t. RSNs, as we’ve previously noted, have been on the run for years, as customers fled their cable setups for the new world of streaming services and a la carte viewing. With the mass cable providers losing subscribers, the sports networks’ compensation began dwindling. It’s a slow death spiral now.
Until it’s over, though, the RSN model still matters, which is why Comcast/Xfinity and Bally/Diamond will work things out. Among other things, Diamond Sports Group needs the revenue, even at a reduced rate, if it’s going to successfully emerge from bankruptcy next month via an Amazon-backed plan.
The basis of the most recent contract dispute is simple. Comcast wants to put Diamond’s RSNs on a premium subscription tier, which users have to pay more to access. It’s a straight revenue proposition. Diamond, understandably, wants its networks kept as part of the standard cable package, where it can reach more viewers.
The parties let a short-term deadline expire without working anything out, a dunderheaded move but not a fatal one. In the here and now, fans in 11 MLB markets lost access to the Bally/Diamond networks, and if it went on forever, fans of NHL and NBA teams would eventually notice. (That doesn’t matter currently, since both those leagues are in national playoff broadcast mode.)
MLB’s rooting interest here is certainly subject to interpretation. As Evan Drellich pointed out in The Athletic, league commissioner Rob Manfred said in February that he’d like to launch a streaming package with about half of the league’s teams by 2025. For that to happen, Diamond’s bankruptcy restructuring plan would have to fail in court, leaving many markets without a significant delivery method and opening up their rights to an MLB production.
At the same time, the league doesn’t necessarily want to see Diamond fail. A successful emergence from bankruptcy could lead to several more years of relative broadcast stability in a bunch of markets even if yearly payouts decrease, and that could be important for several MLB franchises.
But the long-term industry goal makes more sense with the passing of time. We’re nowhere near being a streaming-only nation – even with cable taking massive hits, for example, Comcast still claims more than 14 million subscribers – but for MLB, being able to offer a streaming package that can be picked up almost anywhere, with no idiotic local blackout, is eventually going to sound like very good business.
America’s major sports industries all handle this situation differently. The NFL is practically exempt, since its deal is entirely national. For the others, this transition from cable-dominant to streaming-oriented is a slow turn of a large ship – but a critical one.
And MLB will get there. It probably won’t be as soon as Rob Manfred daydreamed earlier this year, but the turn is under way. This Comcast-Bally brawl is a little entertaining and a lot irritating, but it’s a sideshow. The real action is still in its early days.
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.
