MLB, FOX Discuss Removing Blackout Restrictions
Will MLB.TV be blackout free? Say it’s so, Joe. According to Forbes, Major League Baseball and FOX are negotiating a deal that would remove blackouts from any games streamed by FOX regional sports networks. Last year, FOX-owned regional sports networks aired 37 percent of all broadcasted games.
The biggest roadblock to a deal is how this affects FOX. If MLB Advanced Media, the digital arm of the MLB, can offer the games on MLB.TV without blackouts, it’d cut in to the amount of viewers on FOX Sports GO, the network’s streaming service, and on foxsports.com. In 2014, the nationally broadcasted games, including the All-Star Game and World Series, streamed to FOX’s mobile app without blackouts. And while they’d attract viewers that don’t subscribe to MLB.TV, they’d still lose a piece of the pie.
The real news here, though, is that blackouts are finally being addressed. And for that, we have to give thanks to the new commissioner, Rob Manfred. As far as we know, Bud Selig never pushed for a resolution. And while Manfred is at least making a deal with FOX a priority, he does acknowledge the challenges that television territories carry in order to lift blackouts completely.
“Television territories that cause these blackouts are integral to the economics of the game,” Manfred told Forbes. “They’re a foundation of the very structure of the league. Blackouts are actually caused, not by our desire not to cover that area, but by the inability of the rights holder to get distribution in certain parts of the television territories. It’s not solely our issue to resolve. Having said that I am aware of these complaints and whenever we have an issue like this we are constantly evaluating how we do business to make sure we are as fan friendly as possible.”
Maury Brown, the Forbes contributor that broke this story, published a MLB Blackout Map to illustrate the TV territories. “While there has been a thawing of blackouts on the national level,” Brown wrote, “it is local broadcasts that create the most trouble due to territories for each club that started out as over-the-air reach, and ran amok as pay-TV took hold. They are, to the fans, arbitrary, and at the very least, arcane.”
These regional sports networks that run TV territories want to get paid. Ultimatley, this is the problem facing any solution to blackouts. Paul Swydan of FanGraphs dissected this issue brilliantly on Friday, and included his idea of a Super Premium MLB.TV package that would keep the local networks from losing revenue generated by carriage fees (due to lost cable customers) and allow the networks to run their local ads, rather than the MLB.TV ads we get now.
These are complicated issues to work through. But I like I wrote earlier, the real news here is the problem is finally being addressed.
“This reported agreement between MLB and FOX is a nice first step,” Swydan wrote. “Hopefully we’ll see more steps soon.”
Image via Billy Bob Bain
Seth loves baseball and anything with Sriracha in it. Follow him on Twitter @sethkeichline.
Or you could just not worry about black-out areas and use a VPN. A decent one is about $30ish per year. I do this when my local team is playing in the “free game of the day”, and for the NHL gamecenter live package and don’t miss games ever, no matter where I am. Yes it is not technically allowed, but it’s not like the ISPs are actively trying to stop it, as they have no skin in the game. A cousin who works tech support for an ISP told me that there really is no good/easy way for them to do anything to stop geocoding circumvention, even if they wanted to.
I would rather weatch the better game than the local sports team.