Comcast was unable to reach a deal this week on carriage with the owner of 18 regional sports networks.
If you’re a baseball fan and a Comcast subscriber, it’s possible you’ve had to catch the games the old-fashioned way: by listening on the radio instead of watching them on TV. That’s because the carriage agreement between Comcast and the media company Diamond Sports Group, which owns 18 regional sports networks, expired this week.
That left Comcast customers in more than a dozen markets without the ability to watch their local Major League Baseball teams.
The prevailing local sports media business model from the 1980s until about five years ago was for sports teams to sell their rights to a regional sports network, which would then sell carriage rights to a cable company.
“Then, the consumer would buy a bundle,” said Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith.
But now, with streaming, consumers have more options. They can choose to buy only what they want — not the whole bundle. Others are opting to pirate the games instead, Zimbalist said.
“There’s stations you can go to that are stealing the signals. It’s something that a lot of a lot of youth know how to access,” he said.
Now, some sports teams are selling their rights to local broadcasting affiliates instead of regional sports networks, noted Brian Wieser of the consulting firm Madison and Wall.
Those can be accessed through cable or even with rabbit ears, he said.
“So free to air, which has the added benefit of broadening the appeal potentially of a sport, making it possible for people without a subscription to see these games,” said Wieser.
It’s kind of a call back to the way we used to watch sports back in the ’70s and ’80s, he added.
