Media
Nothing fills up the ol’ sports media columnist’s email inbox with gripes like when a local team’s game is exclusive to one streaming service or another.
It inevitably happens whenever the Bruins have a random ESPN+ appointment, and it happened most recently last Sunday when the Red Sox’ game with the Cardinals was the first to be streamed as Roku’s “MLB Sunday Leadoff” games. The tone of the questions ranged from “What is Roku?” to “Do I have Roku?” to “What in the name of Ned Martin is a Roku?” to queries filled with an assortment of words preceding Roku that must go unprinted here.
The questions are all valid, and so is the complaint. It’s extremely frustrating when you pay, say, $30 a month for the NESN 360 app to discover that a particular game is on another service, especially one that requires busting out the credit card yet again.
Major League Baseball’s separate streaming deals are . . . tolerable, for now, at least if you’re aware of what’s airing when. Roku took over the Sunday package from Peacock this year, and Apple TV+ has those weird Friday night broadcasts.
It’s going to become even more complicated when Venu Sports — the pending mutual sports streaming platform of ESPN, Warner Brothers Discovery, and Fox — launches in the fall. ESPN, WBD, and Fox own national baseball broadcast rights already, of course, although ESPN is reportedly pondering getting out of the deal.
Meanwhile, baseball’s primary service, MLB.tv, has a fundamental and long-annoying problem — it allows for watching out-of-market games only.
Commissioner Rob Manfred said in February that he hopes to launch a direct-to-consumer streaming service next season that would eliminate local blackouts, but any quest to make broadcast rights national is going to run head-on into resistance from big-market teams such as the Red Sox, Dodgers, and Yankees.
Amid the uncertainty, only one thing can be counted on: MLB will happily divide up the rights even more if the desired number of millions of dollars is sent its way, and it will not care a half-an-iota about further complicating fans’ viewing options.
And we were reminded recently when the NFL schedule officially dropped, the rights are sliced even thinner in that sport. The reason there is as obvious as the perpetual smirk on commissioner Roger Goodell’s face. The television and overall appeal of the NFL — and the money it commands — towers above every other sport.
Consider: The main MLB broadcast rights deal, with ESPN, WBD, and Fox, which runs through 2028, breaks down like this: ESPN pays $550 million per year, WBD $535 million, and Fox, which airs the World Series, $729 million. As for a streaming-only option, Apple pays Major League Baseball $85 million per year over seven years for the rights to the Friday game package.
Now here’s how the NFL’s rights deals break down annually. (Most run through 2033).
· Disney (ESPN/ABC), $2.7 billion – right, with a b;
· Fox, $2.2 billion;
· CBS, $2.1 billion;
· NBC, $2 billion. (And it paid $100 million to stream a single playoff game on Peacock);
· YouTube TV/Google (for NFL Sunday Ticket), $2 billion;
· NFL Network, $1.3 billion;
· Amazon (for the Thursday package), $1 billion.
And then there’s the most recent addition, Netflix, which reached a deal earlier this month to stream two Christmas Day games in 2024 and one apiece in ‘25 and ‘26. Netflix will pay $150 million for the two games this year, per a Bloomberg report.
Those two Christmas Day games this year are obviously part of what is sure to be a successful plan to steal the holiday from the NBA. Think Goodell and the 32 owners gave a moment of thought to the fact that Christmas falls on a Wednesday this year?
Every network and streaming service that features sports as programming practically has to be in the NFL business if it wants to compete. Ninety-three of the top 100 most-watched programs on television in 2023 were NFL broadcasts, up from 82 in 2022.
Just this week, NBCUniversal giddily announced that “NBC Sunday Night Football” ranked as the most watched show in prime time for a record 13th straight year. How dominant has SNF been historically? The show in second place with the most consecutive years at No. 1, per Nielsen Media Research, is “American Idol,’’ which held the top spot for six straight years (2006-11).
All of this is great for the league and its franchise owners. It’s great for the streamers seeking credibility and subscriptions.
And it utterly stinks for the fans who just want to watch their team on a familiar network at a reasonable cost.