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Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

MLBAM has turned out to be a brilliantly prescient partnership by MLB club owners.

Most of the time you wouldn't accuse the average MLB club owner of being particularly forward thinking, but in 2000 it wasn't obvious that creating an in-house online media company was going to pay off hugely in the long run.

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Only partly forward thinking. They still have all the blackout restrictions, after all.

My feeling is that they're almost certainly being rational on that front. The income from broadcast rights (or network ownership, in the case of the Orioles) is substantial.

That may be true. I meant that it isn't forward thinking to require viewers to have a cable subscription to watch, even if it means more revenue in the short term.

Even for me as a lifelong baseball fan, I've largely stopped watching games. By the time they do away with the restrictions, will I even bother? Who knows.

But I am a little biased and may be overestimating the impact of cord cutting among millennials

If it means more revenue in the short term, and they switch strategies at the point when it no long means more revenue, which they may well do, they are still being forward-thinking. What you are saying is you don't like blackouts and you'd like there to be some reason that MLB is stupid for having them.

You're probably right. MLB has been around a long time, and somehow they still maintain an antitrust exemption, so they probably know what they're doing.

Why is piracy not a good option yet for sports? I'm surprised considering most shows are available in high quality within minutes of broadcasting.

Because "within minutes" isn't the same thing as "concurrently with". There are pirates who attempt to provide that, but generally fail in terms of reliability, quality, etc.

There is, at least for the NHL. It's still not completely reliable but I can watch every game of the regular season and playoffs much easier than using gamecenter (and cheaper). The blackouts are really bad for the NHL. When I lived in Canada, every game for every team was watchable with no blackouts. In the bay area? I can't watch any of the Canadian teams even though they're certainly not in the same market, along with Nashville, New York, St Louis, basically all of them and of course San Jose, LA, Anaheim.

It's useless. So the free streams that are available are amazing.

MLB reached a settlement earlier this year in an antitrust suit over the blackout restrictions. It's not perfect, but did help a bit. Price increases of MLB.tv subscriptions are capped until 2020, they had to introduce a no-geographic-blackout option for subscribing to a single team's games (though when the game would have been blacked out by regional market, you have to have a cable subscription which offers the local broadcast in order to dodge the blackout), and they had to commit to either getting agreements to allow in-market streaming of games Comcast, Fox and Root regional affiliates' areas or else be unable to raise subscription prices at all until 2020.

You're still stuck with the fact that any game ESPN picks up is blacked out nationwide, though.

> you have to have a cable subscription which offers the local broadcast

I watch all NFL local broadcast games over a cheap digital OTA. Can the same thing be done here for people without cable?

With only a handful of exceptions (ie the Los Angeles Dodgers show about 10 games a year on an OTA station), every team has exclusive deals with cable tv stations for local broadcasts. Even Fox has taken to putting many of their weekend national broadcasts on FS1, a cable channel. ESPN also has a Sunday night game on cable only.

So the short answer is: no.

Baseball was the sport to do this; Lots of statistics nerds are baseball fans, and they got into computers early on. Seems like the synergy worked out well.

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