MLB to end local area blackouts of games? Time for the NHL to come out of the Stone Age.

[Lt Dan]

Living in Las Vegas, I cannot watch the following teams on MLB.tv: Dodgers (270 miles), Angels (264 miles), Diamondbacks (302 miles), San Diego (332 miles), A's (550 miles), or San Francisco(570 miles). All of them really local and most of them not available on Las Vegas cable in any fashion. I really only care when they are playing the Blue Jays but it is really annoying.

that has to suck

If it is any solace to you, I live in the greater LA Area but my city is not a Spectrum city and I haven't been able to see Dodgers games in over 5 years because they want too much per subscriber

 

[Groo]

Obvious troll post.

The NHL is the 6th richest sports league in the world!
List of professional sports leagues by revenue - Wikipedia

Not trolling at all
So not even half the revenue as a NBA or MLB team. Not even going to bother bringing in the NFL.
Wow bigger than a slew of Asian or Euro leagues in revenue per team
What % of each teams revenue come from fans attending games vs TV money?

 

[Tawnos]

"Not even half the revenue" represents several orders of magnitude more than minor league baseball.

 

[HugoSimon]

A monopoly is not an agreement Anyone who has taken a half-decent economics course would know that.

As for the grocery store analogy, I can only buy Jamie Oliver branded products at Sobeys-owned stores. Your olive oil analogy fails because the NHL is not the only hockey you can watch nor is it the only major league sport you can watch.

Your black market analogy works about as well as saying that luxury watch makers like Rolex are going to have to lower their prices because the black market is producing nearly identical watches for much cheaper.

Equating not wanting to pay the market rate for a product to buying a product that has been criminalized is silly. One is disagreeing with a stupid law while the other is being cheap.

Are you seriously suggesting the NHL isn't operating as a monopoly? This is a cartoonish argument. I'm sure if someone mentions the return of a WHA league you'd be first to scream that it can't happen because of the absolute dominance of the NHL.

I'm not for stealing but I'm not for blindly supporting a monopoly either. If people steal from a league extorting $650 million per expansion I'm just gonna shrug my shoulders.

The reality is piracy went away due to brands like netflix/youtube offering cutthroat pricing on its goods. They made it more convenient to purchase than to steal, and with the fragmentation of the streaming market we're approaching a reset point.

The recipe for a new wave of piracy is right in front of you.

Not to mention people have to agree with the notion that stealing intellectual property is the same as stealing actual goods.

I'm strongly for supporting intellectual property regardless of whether or not I have to. But its directly because I want to support the entertainment I enjoy, not because I feel an overreaching moral obligation.

I can't understand the mindset where people are surprised that people steal from mega corporations like the NHL. Virtually all of their income is generated from having a monopoly on arenas, players, and imagery that preceded the corporate overlords.

I consider myself more of a sports business fan than a fan of sports. So I really don't care if someone can't afford to goto a game etc. I like capitalism, free markets etc, but I can't pretend that I care if someone is not a fan of a gigantic single unit monopoly.

 

[BKIslandersFan]

Are you seriously suggesting the NHL isn't operating as a monopoly? This is a cartoonish argument. I'm sure if someone mentions the return of a WHA league you'd be first to scream that it can't happen because of the absolute dominance of the NHL.

I'm not for stealing but I'm not for blindly supporting a monopoly either. If people steal from a league extorting $650 million per expansion I'm just gonna shrug my shoulders.

The reality is piracy went away due to brands like netflix/youtube offering cutthroat pricing on its goods. They made it more convenient to purchase than to steal, and with the fragmentation of the streaming market we're approaching a reset point.

The recipe for a new wave of piracy is right in front of you.

Not to mention people have to agree with the notion that stealing intellectual property is the same as stealing actual goods.

I'm strongly for supporting intellectual property regardless of whether or not I have to. But its directly because I want to support the entertainment I enjoy, not because I feel an overreaching moral obligation.

I can't understand the mindset where people are surprised that people steal from mega corporations like the NHL. Virtually all of their income is generated from having a monopoly on arenas, players, and imagery that preceded the corporate overlords.

I consider myself more of a sports business fan than a fan of sports. So I really don't care if someone can't afford to goto a game etc. I like capitalism, free markets etc, but I can't pretend that I care if someone is not a fan of a gigantic single unit monopoly.

NHL has monopoly on hockey but they don't have monopoly on sports business as a whole. NBA, MLB, and NFL all are their competitors when it comes to season ticket money, television money etc.

 

[HugoSimon]

NHL has monopoly on hockey but they don't have monopoly on sports business as a whole. NBA, MLB, and NFL all are their competitors when it comes to season ticket money, television money etc.

Unless you live in Canada, regardless I'm not claiming they have a monopoly on cooking oil, they have a monopoly on an entire sport.

 

[HugoSimon]

Not trolling at all
So not even half the revenue as a NBA or MLB team. Not even going to bother bringing in the NFL.
Wow bigger than a slew of Asian or Euro leagues in revenue per team
What % of each teams revenue come from fans attending games vs TV money?

You realize you're making the argument that the NHL is nothing because it is in the same financial position the other leagues were in just 5-10 years ago?

If my son is 6 foot 6 in the 9th grade it doesn't me he's short just because your son is 6 foot 9 in the 12th.

 

[Rich Nixon]

CSN-Philadelphia is a weird channel. It's not broadcast via satellite; it's still sent via wire. DirecTV does not carry it.

If CSN-Philadelphia is not available through the poster's cable system, s/he will be allowed access to it via Center Ice. And, if s/he has DirecTV, since the channel is unavailable, it cannot be blacked out through Center Ice. CSN-Philly's signal is re-transmitted and compressed to get to satellite.

I'm guessing s/he lives somewhere in Northern Middlesex, Somerset County, or near the beach in Monmouth. Most likely NHL.tv considers the area "Philadelphia" because Philly locals are probably available on cable, or OTA.

A similar situation occurs in upstate New York. The region is considered Sabres territory, although the RSN is MSG. Therefore, the Rangers, Devils, and Islanders are considered local teams too. On cable. there's only so much bandwidth that most times the Rangers, Devils, and Islanders are bumped. The only way to see the games is through Center Ice, or via DirecTV, which does not have the bandwidth problem.

Ding ding ding. If you search my zip or a couple of the adjacent ones on the NHL.tv blackout lookup, you'll get NEW YORK RANGERS, NEW JERSEY DEVILS, NEW YORK ISLANDERS, PHILADELPHIA FLYERS. Which doesn't even make sense, because the spirit of the regional broadcast areas is that three of those teams natively share one, but if you're in that area then by default you are outside of the fourth team's.

I wonder how many people are in bleed-over areas like this, where they can't receive one team's games via any TV provider but are still blacked out from either CI, NHL.tv, or both. I'm sure there's plenty of them, and I'd assume parts of central PA are the same way between Pittsburgh and Philly.

 

[Djp]

It's only a matter of time before the calculus changes and it's no longer more profitable to hold local viewers hostage to their cable company. Cable is dying with or without pro sports, and it's time for the pro leagues to go the HBO route and try to maximize their digital revenues.

Baseball blackout policy is nothing like nhl.

In over the air markets mlb still has blackout policy in the local markets of the teams broadcasts forgames on ESPN . ESPN Sunday night and fox afternoon slot are exclusively theirs where they own tv rights over local markets broadcasters.

The problem with mlb is they claim a market is theirs when there isn’t even local game broadcasts or it’s limited.

For example when buffalo was a farm team for Clevrland, one of the local cable sports got something like 2 games of the Indiana per week to televise locally. Then Clevrland would claim it was their market which then blocked pay per view access peop,e paid for.

Peop,e who think this should happen don’t understand business snd likrly never will.

In home team markets some ststion pays for radio and broadcast rights that they need to recoup via tv advertising. If people locally can by pass this then the tv rights owner loses money and the mlb team loses money.

If a local sports network is easily accessible through cable or satellite then they can claim the market. If the tv network isn’t available in that market by a certain % like 50% or 75% thrn thry can’t claim it.

Sometimes one or two counties at the edge of one media market might be getting the local sports network of the home team 180 miles away thrn thry claim thst market is theirs. That shouldn’t be the case. Thry would need much more market penatration.

This happened when I lived in Virginia Beach in mid 2000s. Part of the market includes NE NC where they got the regional sports network for NCthst Carolina airs. During the playoff season of 2006 when buffalo could face the winner of the Carolina series, some games on versus were blacked out because thry were not designated as exclusive so Carolina claimed thus market was theirsanother tidbit rule out of the cable act...but only about 10-15% of the narkethad access to this network.

In buffalo there was a local cable disputes between cbs and local affiliate with a blackoutso game couldn’t be seen. In Niagara county enough viewers regularly watched CTV out of Totonto which aired the same game do they couldn’t black out the broadcast between two markets.

 

[Spydey629]

I wonder how many people are in bleed-over areas like this, where they can't receive one team's games via any TV provider but are still blacked out from either CI, NHL.tv, or both. I'm sure there's plenty of them, and I'd assume parts of central PA are the same way between Pittsburgh and Philly.

Bingo. I'm outside Harrisburg and blocked out for Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, AND Washington. Even crazier that my best friend lives in Reading and is blacked out for Penguin games as well. You don't get much more Philly-centric than Reading is for major league sports.

My wife and I cut the cord recently, and it drives me nuts. Especially since AT&T Sportsnet Pittsburgh doesn't stream anything worth watching (I don't need to watch 6AM infomercials on my phone). Semi-off topic, I'm still hoping AT&T sells out to NBC/Comcast, since my Hulu Live subscription includes NBC Sports DC and Philly.

 

[tarheelhockey]

NHL has monopoly on hockey but they don't have monopoly on sports business as a whole. NBA, MLB, and NFL all are their competitors when it comes to season ticket money, television money etc.

Yes and no. There is a crossover market between sports, but hockey also occupies an exclusive niche within that market.

Again it's like the cooking oil analogy. There are some people who don't care about the difference between olive oil and peanut oil. But there are other people for whom that distinction has very important medical, religious, or culinary implications. If you're running an Italian restaurant, only one kind of product counts. If someone were to have a monopoly over that product, it wouldn't matter at all that they were also in competition for other niche markets. Likewise, a lot of hockey fans are not actually part of the broader sports marketplace.

 

[Lt Dan]

Yes and no. There is a crossover market between sports, but hockey also occupies an exclusive niche within that market.

Again it's like the cooking oil analogy. There are some people who don't care about the difference between olive oil and peanut oil. But there are other people for whom that distinction has very important medical, religious, or culinary implications. If you're running an Italian restaurant, only one kind of product counts. If someone were to have a monopoly over that product, it wouldn't matter at all that they were also in competition for other niche markets. Likewise, a lot of hockey fans are not actually part of the broader sports marketplace.

very well said

 

[Lt Dan]

Does anyone know if has passed yet for MLB? It is imminent? It is expected to pass ?Or it is merely being discussed?

 

[Grudy0]

According to the article...

As part of his opening statement to reporters at Major League Baseball’s owners meetings this week, commissioner Rob Manfred said that teams had “approved unanimously a revised interactive media rights agreement.”

[...]

Asked to clarify what exactly the “revised interactive media rights agreement” looks like, Manfred said, “The biggest single change was the return of certain in-market digital rights — the rights that have essentially become substitutional with broadcast rights — those rights will return to the clubs.”

But that's much different than the title of this thread, as also according to the article...

Asked how the deal might affect the digital streaming rights to Yankees games within the team’s market, club president Randy Levine said he expected Major League Baseball to announce changes to its policy soon. Teams cannot currently sell digital rights to local broadcasts.

"Within the team's market" and "cannot sell digital rights to local broadcasts" only means if you live in the "YES" region, you might be able to stream a Yankees game by subscribing to a streaming version of YES. It DOESN'T mean MLB.TV will no longer blackout the game if you are in Yankees territory.

 

[SabresSharks]

You'd think a league that regularly boasts about its tech-savvy fanbase would do its utmost to support fans who would happily pay to watch their home teams' games, instead of forcing them into illegal means of getting their hockey fix that provide zero revenue to league coffers.

Broadcast contracts can be renegotiated. C'mon, Gary. Let slip the dogs of law!