As a carriage dispute between Disney and YouTube TV stretches into its second weekend, sports fans emerge as a loser no matter the outcome.
Even before the current prolonged carriage dispute between Disney and YouTube TV, one wouldn’t have to do a deep dive on social media platforms to discover widespread dissent over the current viewing experience of live sports.
Trust me, it’s not your imagination either. Watching games today really is much more of a pain in the ass than it was just 15 years ago, when a cable subscription guaranteed you’d have access to both nationally broadcasted games as well as local broadcasts for your favorite team.
With a crumbling regional sports network industry and a seemingly endless expansion of streaming platforms competing for the rights to broadcast live sports, fans who want to keep up with it all are now left with astronomical bills stemming from numerous streaming subscriptions.
While this seems sudden and shocking to some fans to see so much of the cost shift onto the consumer, this unfortunately is not unprecedented.
For the better part of three decades, regional sports networks thrived as the biggest moneymakers on cable television, racking in stable profits thanks to cable and/or satellite subscriptions being near universal. While RSNs were routinely among the most expensive channels in any given provider’s lineup, millions of people who do not watch sports helped to absorb the cost by simply having cable.
Fast-forward to today’s media landscape, and it couldn’t be both more different and difficult. Gone are the days where the biggest games were guaranteed to be on free network television, with streaming services making their mark on all four major North American professional sports league.
Amazon has utilized their unfathomably deep pockets to land media rights deals with both the NFL and NBA on Prime Video, exclusively airing Thursday Night Football and one Wild Card playoff game while securing Friday night broadcasts, the NBA Cup and a package of postseason games that includes some Conference Finals.
Football fans who enjoy out-of-market games are particularly squeezed by both the current standoff and the current media rights deal for the NFL, with NFL’s Sunday Ticket package being exclusively tied to YouTube TV.
While Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC/ESPN all maintain NFL packages, streaming platforms are now ubiquitous across live sports. ESPN+ and Hulu exclusively broadcast multiple NHL games each week, while Apple TV has been the home of exclusive Friday Night Baseball broadcasts over the past several MLB seasons.
If you’re an NBA fan, you were thrown yet another curveball heading into this season, as Prime Video and NBC/Peacock took over for TNT in the league’s media rights landscape – necessitating two streaming subscriptions just to be able to catch all the national broadcasts – and that’s of course assuming that you have access to network and/or cable television, far from a given for most fans.
The result is a confusing hodge-podge of streaming services and legacy media airing the biggest games while carriage disputes between networks and carriers grow to be more commonplace. Meanwhile, customers are seeing their bills rise while their access to live sports, one of the few remaining cornerstones of live television, is only getting more difficult.
This nightmare of a media landscape to navigate for the American sports fan spells out the need for a comprehensive, streamlined direct-to-consumer platform that can serve as a single point of access for everything a sports fan would be looking for.
While this certainly seems unprecedented given the competitive, less-than-cordial relationships the media companies have with each other, we have seen some sort of leeway in this aspect in the past few years, both of which involve ESPN.
Though this isn’t a matter of ease of access, ESPN’s unique licensing agreement with Turner Sports to air Inside the NBA has been one of the few recent success stories for ESPN. On the other hand, ESPN and Fox recently unveiled the ESPN/Fox One bundle, helping to put at least a solid chunk of live sports in one place for a $40-per-month charge.
Yet even for those hoping that bundle would get them everything they need, it still likely isn’t the case for most sports fans. A Prime Video subscription would still be required to catch Thursday Night Football and several NBA playoff games, while a Peacock subscription would also be needed for the full national NBA slate. This of course isn’t even to mention Netflix’s recent deals with the NFL, which include exclusively broadcasting Christmas Day games as the league poaches the holiday from the NBA.
While the NFL, NBA and NHL are relatively early on in national media rights deals, MLB can offer a glimpse of the future with how their future contracts are structured following expirations at the end of the 2028 season.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred views 2028 as an ideal time to nationalize local media rights deals and do away with blackouts for the league, routinely frustrating to fans who purchase packages such as MLB.TV or NBA League Pass to watch out-of-market games. While the problem has yet to feel as apparent in the NBA or NHL, the crumbling RSN industry has led MLB to already take over regional broadcasts for several teams whose RSNs could no longer make payments amid the Main Street Sports Group bankruptcy.
Even with those efforts seemingly on the way, a patchwork solution for one league does not make tens of millions of American sports fans happy when a wide range of content remains difficult to access. While the ideal solution may be a bit pie-in-the-sky, it ultimately doesn’t vary too much from what the ESPN/Fox One bundle promises.
Of course, Disney and Fox, while very significant players in the sports media landscape, are still just two of several that hold rights to major events. NBC and CBS remain in the Super Bowl rotation with the former seeming to expand their sports portfolio by the day, Amazon holds significant NFL and NBA rights and Apple TV has had exclusive MLB broadcasts for the past four seasons while also holding the rights to Major League Soccer’s Season Pass.
Oh, and while TNT Sports may be out of the NBA picture, the network remains a major player in the sports world thanks to an MLB postseason slate on TBS and an expansive NHL slate that includes the Stanley Cup Finals in odd-numbered years – so you’ll still need a cable subscription to get to any of that.
This underscores the difficulty of adding more players to a bundle like ESPN/Fox One – the sports media landscape now has more than just legacy media networks holding rights as the two entities fight opposite battles, with old networks grinding to stay alive and maintain their presence while streaming platforms aim to take full advantage of the ongoing generation of cord-cutting.
No matter how difficult that may be, we’re approaching a point of necessity as subscription prices raise across the board while the amount of subscriptions you need to just simply watch a game have skyrocketed.
With the Disney/YouTube TV impasse on the verge of blacking out a Game of the Year on Monday Night Football a week after seeing a precipitous drop in viewership, it’d be foolish to put any faith in greedy corporations to resolve this in a timely manner. No longer do the networks and carriers even pretend to care about returning a product that was viewed as a given cultural mainstay for generations.
In a perfect world, sports and the broadcasts of games would be treated like the cultural cornerstone it is. While this statement likely would scare the living shit out of millions of McCarthyist Americans, a publicly-owned sports media landscape with free broadcasts across the board would take all of the headaches away from what has become a corporate charade that is forced to play out in front of the public.
For far too long, sports and their consumption have been viewed as a limitless profit machine, something that can always reliably drive in money whether a fan is attending a game, out at the store in front of team-branded merchandise or at home, needing to take out the wallet just to make sure one can watch a game.
In reality, for the vast majority of Americans who cherish live sports, they serve as both an escape and a way to bond and form deep connections with family, friends and community. In an increasingly isolated, paranoid and dystopian world, sports remain one of the very few pastimes that can make you forget about all of that, if even just for a few hours.
With the laundry list of steps a fan must take to even watch a game now, viewing sports is starting to become more of a reminder of the greed-driven corporate world we live in as opposed to a virtuous escape.
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