I’m going to break away from the baseball previews because I got an email from my good friend Brian, who recently moved to Nashville, and it fired me up.
Every season I purchase a subscription to MLBTV and a VPN. I'm in Charlotte so I am forced to spend extra in order to watch every game. I use Express VPN.
A friend of mine watches all his sport interests on a bootleg streaming website. If baseball and the cable companies aren't careful, we'll all be doing that soon.
Try watching in Iowa. Blackout teams include Cubs, White Sox, Royals, Twins, Cardinals and Brewers. I’ve even been blacked out of games in Detroit and Cincinnati.
I live in eastern Pennsylvania. As a hockey fan, I would love to give the NHL (now ESPN) money to watch hockey. But I don't, because the following teams are all blacked out where I live:
Flyers
Penguins
Capitals
Rangers
Islanders
Devils
Sabres
Bruins
That's EIGHT teams. One-fourth of the entire league. A whole divison's worth. For the most part the only games I'm allowed to watch are the ones that start when I'm getting ready for bed, unless the Panthers and Hurricanes happen to be playing on a given day.
Comcast is never getting a dime from me, so, lots o' luck with your desperate efforts to stave off the inevitable extinction of your obsolete business model, guys.
This is why A) I don't have cable anymore and B) don't watch baseball, for the most part. I'm 41 and live in Iowa and am content on following online without actually watching any games. If it's on national TV (antenna), I'll catch it, no matter who it is. But that's a very, tiny sample
By some miracle, my Reds have managed to avoid being part of the "blocked party" here in Vegas. Of course this season, after the preseason fire sale, maybe they should be.
It’s almost like the MLB teams have colluded together to ensure the lowest percentage of people below the age of 50 will have any interest in their sport. And they’re doing a great job of it!
It would be like if FedEx in 1910 said we will only deliver mail using horses for the next 25 years!
It's easier for me to watch the Astros (yeah yeah) out here in Virginia via MLB.tv than it is for my brother to watch them in Corpus Christi. But the blackout stupidity is only part of it.
The Astros in 2012(!, not exactly a good team then) decided to leave Fox Sports and start their own regional sports network: Comcast SportsNet. No one would carry it, it died and then became AT&T SportsNet and their carriage was terrible and still isn't that great.
In the early '00s, the Astros used to be on Fox Sports Southwest (widely available) in San Antonio and Corpus Christi. Then, in 2012, with the CSN debacle, they basically went off their air in most of the state. I think finally after years of pennants the ATTSN carriage is a little better now but still they still aren't on Spectrum.
What this is to me is yet another of many, many, many, many terrible side effects of Baseball continuing to run it's league with 30 little despot leaders of 30 little kingdoms, instead of running it as one business with 30 members. If they pooled their revenue like the NFL and NBA, many of these problems would disappear.
First, there could be actual revenue sharing and actual parity. Maybe they would open up their books, as one entity, and there could be a salary cap and a real floor (not one at about at a little over half the cap like they were floating - other leagues are near 90% of the cap for a floor)tied to revenue (Maybe they wouldn't do that anyway - they were paying about 37% of revenue in 2019 compared to 48-50% for other leagues, and the players are going to want to compensated like other leagues with open books to consider one)
Tanking would become a thing of the past, as teams would have to spend that money anyway - and it is mostly over money, not draft picks -but the profit would be close to the same for all the teams.
Forgetting this pipe dream of pulling the MLB into the 21st century, how would we fix this now?
Just a brief scan of comments on this site showed many ideas that dovetail with mine.
First off, you can forget the streaming services. The national streaming services are never going to pay enough again to make it worth it for the RSNs to give them their product, (That they paid a ton of money for and you can't expect them to just give it away for almost free, which is what services like YouTube and Hulu want) and when they did, they didn't show the RSNs commercials. They showed either the streaming services commercials or a message screen. How does the RSN make money selling advertising for that? I can't really blame the RSNs. I wouldn't want to give something away when I paid that much for exclusive rights. It is probably never going to happen again. Live sports is something that becomes harder when you cut the cord. That may change someday, but it is certainly that way now, and that part is something everyone has to accept.
But there are ways for the MLB to fix this for their app by working with the RSNs in the existing system. First, it is silly they don't have a price for a certain team, where you can watch that team wherever you are, instead of paying for the whole league. I would say at least half, and probably more of the people getting MLBTV are doing it to watch one particular team. You give half that money to the RSN, and you stream their broadcast, including their commercials. If someone wants to be more flexible and watch all the teams, they can add a price for removing the blackout on one team (or per team if they want to do more) wherever they play and show their commercials, again splitting that money with the RSN. This would end up making more revenue for the MLB, and their partners, overall.
If they don't do this, they need to make it a demand that RSNs have a viable streaming app that can be purchased and accessed on the major smart TVs. Not just google play and apple. I know there are young people that watch on their phones, but the majority of baseball fans are older like me and don't watch on their phones, they watch on TV. Whether they fix the MLB app or make this a requirement, they have to understand that times and viewing habits have changed and making their product available is vital to the future of their business.
It really seems like Baseball goes out of it's way at times to cost itself money and fans. They can fix this with the MLBTV app, make more money and satisfy the RSNs at the same time. I think any fan of a particular team who cut the cord would gladly pay to watch all their favorite team's play live easily.
Great article, even if you have to find soome sympathy for Manfred.
I support the plan mentioned in the comments to end the blackouts but pay local RSNs for every subscriber in their territory that buys MLB.tv.
The sad thing is that this is how the game dies. When I was a kid, I could recite to you the numbers and stats of players long dead in addition to those alive. Now I am 37 and can only name sure-fire Hall of Famers and those in the news for unsavory reasons. I live in Oklahoma and cannot pass down a love of this game for any of four teams and have to pretend to root for another team like you and the Browns. I'd happily buy a package from an RSN if it had an app, but they are behind the times, too. My kid isn't going to watch baseball, just like I haven't been for the past decade.
The sad thing is I am one of the few people left that pay $200 per month for cable. If it was just me I would cut the cord. However with the multiple services I would have to buy for all of my wife's shows it just doesn't make sense to save $20-40/month. Not to mention I would have to teach her where to go and how to access each separate service.
That being said there are many free illegal streams that just work, look great, and I can pick which broadcast I want to watch. Watching on TV for me works fine, but the Bally Sports app is terrible and it's usually easier to pirate the Blues or Cardinals than use that pile of garbage.
There are many people that would pay a lot of money to just watch their team whenever they want, on whatever device they want, wherever they are. VPNs or whatever work fine for the purpose, but why are you forcing your paying customers to jump through those hoops. Paying MLB directly should be the absolute best experience you can find.
The amounts are arbitrary, put in whatever values you want, but how about pay $125/season to watch ALL of your team's games. Pay $225 to watch every team. If you want playoffs only, pay $40 for your team's games or $50 for all teams. If you want the ability to watch classic games on demand or something, add $50 to the single team package and $100 to the all team package. A portion of the money can go to the regional sports networks or to the team which they can disperse to the network if that is agreed upon. If you have the package for all teams, maybe split the regional sports money among the teams that you watched?
The obvious solution here would be for MLB.TV to offer an upgrade to their plan that would lift the blackout, per team, and then pay all or part of that to the RSN. So you could pay $130 or whatever for the national plan, and another $30-50 for your local team. Which would, admittedly, be worse than just not having blackouts, but at least would be something.
So if it's obvious, why don't they do it? I suspect that it's because the model for cable producers, since the beginning, has been to collect payments from people who don't watch their channel. ESPN gets paid by every subscriber whether or not they watch a minute of sports, and so do the Food Channel and Fox and MSNBC and all of them. New Yorkers might remember the standoff when the Yankees were insisting that their new YES channel had to be offered on the regular plan by the cable providers, not as a premium add on. They did that because they wanted to be able to collect a payment for every subscriber, not just Yankees fans.
(This is another way of saying that sports fans are subsidized by non-sports fans - and of course, the same is true of foodies and Fox-watchers, etc.)
I suspect the RSNs would, at this point, reject the solution I offered above because it would completely cannibalize their business to the point of failure. More people would stop subscribing to cable; those that did subscribe would watch less sports; and eventually the cable company would be able to reduce what they pay the RSN, move it to a premium tier, or drop it entirely. And even if the RSN broke even on the actual games, nobody would be watching the pregame show and the postgame show and whatever they show at 10 am, depriving them of ad revenues.
Eventually (I think), this will all collapse. Exactly what will replace it, who knows. But it seems like the powers that be are holding on to the old model as long as they can.
My dad lives in the middle of Oregon, Giants fan, all games blacked out because of Eugene affiliate. He doesn't get the Eugene channel (45 minutes away) and he's a 10 hr drive to SF. I'm a Giants fan in Austin, TX. Can't see any games vs Astros or Rangers, perhaps obvious, but then they also black out vs Chicago?! Whether or not it's MLB TV's fault, they profit off the fans, who then can only see a small percentage of the games. grrrr.
I live in Arkansas. Cards, Royals, Astro’s & Rangers blacked out. Many years ago, I signed up with Dish to watch Cardinals. Then they did not renew with Fox Midwest. Then went to Hulu to watch Cards - they lost Bally MW. Then went to Utube tv - they lost Bally MW. Only way I can watch Cardinals now is on Direct TV and I have signed on. Point is, only very few fans would do what I have done to watch their favorite teams. Fans who don’t live in a city with a cable system that carry their teams have a hard time watching MLB. Baseball continues to lose fans because of the difficulty and cost of watching their favorite teams.
Loved in Little Rock for 3.5 years and experienced the same blackout frustration, but to a lesser extent since I’m a Braves fan. But it was maddening that on any given day, there were 6-8 teams that I couldn’t watch, even though I was paying the same amount as everyone else. “Thankful” now to blacked out from *only* one team living in Colorado, but still makes for brutal days when they play the Braves, and really hinders me getting invested in the Rockies (not factoring in ownership’s habit of paying other teams to take their best players).
Wow. This post may set the JoeBlogs record for responses. Lotsa irritated baseball fans!
All of Joe's subscribers are obviously willing to pay for online content, so we aren't cheapskates. I subscribe to multiple online providers and believe in paying my way - and feel forced to make an exception for live baseball. Like many others I discontinued MLB.TV due to the blackouts and found one of those free pirate sites. I'd pay MLB the bucks if I got to watch the games.
Every season I purchase a subscription to MLBTV and a VPN. I'm in Charlotte so I am forced to spend extra in order to watch every game. I use Express VPN.
A friend of mine watches all his sport interests on a bootleg streaming website. If baseball and the cable companies aren't careful, we'll all be doing that soon.
Try watching in Iowa. Blackout teams include Cubs, White Sox, Royals, Twins, Cardinals and Brewers. I’ve even been blacked out of games in Detroit and Cincinnati.
I live in eastern Pennsylvania. As a hockey fan, I would love to give the NHL (now ESPN) money to watch hockey. But I don't, because the following teams are all blacked out where I live:
Flyers
Penguins
Capitals
Rangers
Islanders
Devils
Sabres
Bruins
That's EIGHT teams. One-fourth of the entire league. A whole divison's worth. For the most part the only games I'm allowed to watch are the ones that start when I'm getting ready for bed, unless the Panthers and Hurricanes happen to be playing on a given day.
Comcast is never getting a dime from me, so, lots o' luck with your desperate efforts to stave off the inevitable extinction of your obsolete business model, guys.
This is why A) I don't have cable anymore and B) don't watch baseball, for the most part. I'm 41 and live in Iowa and am content on following online without actually watching any games. If it's on national TV (antenna), I'll catch it, no matter who it is. But that's a very, tiny sample
By some miracle, my Reds have managed to avoid being part of the "blocked party" here in Vegas. Of course this season, after the preseason fire sale, maybe they should be.
It’s almost like the MLB teams have colluded together to ensure the lowest percentage of people below the age of 50 will have any interest in their sport. And they’re doing a great job of it!
It would be like if FedEx in 1910 said we will only deliver mail using horses for the next 25 years!
It's easier for me to watch the Astros (yeah yeah) out here in Virginia via MLB.tv than it is for my brother to watch them in Corpus Christi. But the blackout stupidity is only part of it.
The Astros in 2012(!, not exactly a good team then) decided to leave Fox Sports and start their own regional sports network: Comcast SportsNet. No one would carry it, it died and then became AT&T SportsNet and their carriage was terrible and still isn't that great.
In the early '00s, the Astros used to be on Fox Sports Southwest (widely available) in San Antonio and Corpus Christi. Then, in 2012, with the CSN debacle, they basically went off their air in most of the state. I think finally after years of pennants the ATTSN carriage is a little better now but still they still aren't on Spectrum.
I subscribed to mlb last year and was so frustrated b/c I couldn’t see my home team’s games. I will listen to Royal’s games on the radio this season…
“It’s infuriating.” Yup. That sums it up.
What this is to me is yet another of many, many, many, many terrible side effects of Baseball continuing to run it's league with 30 little despot leaders of 30 little kingdoms, instead of running it as one business with 30 members. If they pooled their revenue like the NFL and NBA, many of these problems would disappear.
First, there could be actual revenue sharing and actual parity. Maybe they would open up their books, as one entity, and there could be a salary cap and a real floor (not one at about at a little over half the cap like they were floating - other leagues are near 90% of the cap for a floor)tied to revenue (Maybe they wouldn't do that anyway - they were paying about 37% of revenue in 2019 compared to 48-50% for other leagues, and the players are going to want to compensated like other leagues with open books to consider one)
Tanking would become a thing of the past, as teams would have to spend that money anyway - and it is mostly over money, not draft picks -but the profit would be close to the same for all the teams.
Forgetting this pipe dream of pulling the MLB into the 21st century, how would we fix this now?
Just a brief scan of comments on this site showed many ideas that dovetail with mine.
First off, you can forget the streaming services. The national streaming services are never going to pay enough again to make it worth it for the RSNs to give them their product, (That they paid a ton of money for and you can't expect them to just give it away for almost free, which is what services like YouTube and Hulu want) and when they did, they didn't show the RSNs commercials. They showed either the streaming services commercials or a message screen. How does the RSN make money selling advertising for that? I can't really blame the RSNs. I wouldn't want to give something away when I paid that much for exclusive rights. It is probably never going to happen again. Live sports is something that becomes harder when you cut the cord. That may change someday, but it is certainly that way now, and that part is something everyone has to accept.
But there are ways for the MLB to fix this for their app by working with the RSNs in the existing system. First, it is silly they don't have a price for a certain team, where you can watch that team wherever you are, instead of paying for the whole league. I would say at least half, and probably more of the people getting MLBTV are doing it to watch one particular team. You give half that money to the RSN, and you stream their broadcast, including their commercials. If someone wants to be more flexible and watch all the teams, they can add a price for removing the blackout on one team (or per team if they want to do more) wherever they play and show their commercials, again splitting that money with the RSN. This would end up making more revenue for the MLB, and their partners, overall.
If they don't do this, they need to make it a demand that RSNs have a viable streaming app that can be purchased and accessed on the major smart TVs. Not just google play and apple. I know there are young people that watch on their phones, but the majority of baseball fans are older like me and don't watch on their phones, they watch on TV. Whether they fix the MLB app or make this a requirement, they have to understand that times and viewing habits have changed and making their product available is vital to the future of their business.
It really seems like Baseball goes out of it's way at times to cost itself money and fans. They can fix this with the MLBTV app, make more money and satisfy the RSNs at the same time. I think any fan of a particular team who cut the cord would gladly pay to watch all their favorite team's play live easily.
Joe,
Great article, even if you have to find soome sympathy for Manfred.
I support the plan mentioned in the comments to end the blackouts but pay local RSNs for every subscriber in their territory that buys MLB.tv.
The sad thing is that this is how the game dies. When I was a kid, I could recite to you the numbers and stats of players long dead in addition to those alive. Now I am 37 and can only name sure-fire Hall of Famers and those in the news for unsavory reasons. I live in Oklahoma and cannot pass down a love of this game for any of four teams and have to pretend to root for another team like you and the Browns. I'd happily buy a package from an RSN if it had an app, but they are behind the times, too. My kid isn't going to watch baseball, just like I haven't been for the past decade.
But thanks for helping me ease back in, Joe.
The sad thing is I am one of the few people left that pay $200 per month for cable. If it was just me I would cut the cord. However with the multiple services I would have to buy for all of my wife's shows it just doesn't make sense to save $20-40/month. Not to mention I would have to teach her where to go and how to access each separate service.
That being said there are many free illegal streams that just work, look great, and I can pick which broadcast I want to watch. Watching on TV for me works fine, but the Bally Sports app is terrible and it's usually easier to pirate the Blues or Cardinals than use that pile of garbage.
There are many people that would pay a lot of money to just watch their team whenever they want, on whatever device they want, wherever they are. VPNs or whatever work fine for the purpose, but why are you forcing your paying customers to jump through those hoops. Paying MLB directly should be the absolute best experience you can find.
The amounts are arbitrary, put in whatever values you want, but how about pay $125/season to watch ALL of your team's games. Pay $225 to watch every team. If you want playoffs only, pay $40 for your team's games or $50 for all teams. If you want the ability to watch classic games on demand or something, add $50 to the single team package and $100 to the all team package. A portion of the money can go to the regional sports networks or to the team which they can disperse to the network if that is agreed upon. If you have the package for all teams, maybe split the regional sports money among the teams that you watched?
If you build it they will come.
The obvious solution here would be for MLB.TV to offer an upgrade to their plan that would lift the blackout, per team, and then pay all or part of that to the RSN. So you could pay $130 or whatever for the national plan, and another $30-50 for your local team. Which would, admittedly, be worse than just not having blackouts, but at least would be something.
So if it's obvious, why don't they do it? I suspect that it's because the model for cable producers, since the beginning, has been to collect payments from people who don't watch their channel. ESPN gets paid by every subscriber whether or not they watch a minute of sports, and so do the Food Channel and Fox and MSNBC and all of them. New Yorkers might remember the standoff when the Yankees were insisting that their new YES channel had to be offered on the regular plan by the cable providers, not as a premium add on. They did that because they wanted to be able to collect a payment for every subscriber, not just Yankees fans.
(This is another way of saying that sports fans are subsidized by non-sports fans - and of course, the same is true of foodies and Fox-watchers, etc.)
I suspect the RSNs would, at this point, reject the solution I offered above because it would completely cannibalize their business to the point of failure. More people would stop subscribing to cable; those that did subscribe would watch less sports; and eventually the cable company would be able to reduce what they pay the RSN, move it to a premium tier, or drop it entirely. And even if the RSN broke even on the actual games, nobody would be watching the pregame show and the postgame show and whatever they show at 10 am, depriving them of ad revenues.
Eventually (I think), this will all collapse. Exactly what will replace it, who knows. But it seems like the powers that be are holding on to the old model as long as they can.
My dad lives in the middle of Oregon, Giants fan, all games blacked out because of Eugene affiliate. He doesn't get the Eugene channel (45 minutes away) and he's a 10 hr drive to SF. I'm a Giants fan in Austin, TX. Can't see any games vs Astros or Rangers, perhaps obvious, but then they also black out vs Chicago?! Whether or not it's MLB TV's fault, they profit off the fans, who then can only see a small percentage of the games. grrrr.
I live in Arkansas. Cards, Royals, Astro’s & Rangers blacked out. Many years ago, I signed up with Dish to watch Cardinals. Then they did not renew with Fox Midwest. Then went to Hulu to watch Cards - they lost Bally MW. Then went to Utube tv - they lost Bally MW. Only way I can watch Cardinals now is on Direct TV and I have signed on. Point is, only very few fans would do what I have done to watch their favorite teams. Fans who don’t live in a city with a cable system that carry their teams have a hard time watching MLB. Baseball continues to lose fans because of the difficulty and cost of watching their favorite teams.
Loved in Little Rock for 3.5 years and experienced the same blackout frustration, but to a lesser extent since I’m a Braves fan. But it was maddening that on any given day, there were 6-8 teams that I couldn’t watch, even though I was paying the same amount as everyone else. “Thankful” now to blacked out from *only* one team living in Colorado, but still makes for brutal days when they play the Braves, and really hinders me getting invested in the Rockies (not factoring in ownership’s habit of paying other teams to take their best players).
Wow. This post may set the JoeBlogs record for responses. Lotsa irritated baseball fans!
All of Joe's subscribers are obviously willing to pay for online content, so we aren't cheapskates. I subscribe to multiple online providers and believe in paying my way - and feel forced to make an exception for live baseball. Like many others I discontinued MLB.TV due to the blackouts and found one of those free pirate sites. I'd pay MLB the bucks if I got to watch the games.