Hacker News Reader

Comment by porcoda | Hacker News Reader

Finally! I don't care if it's apple or someone else, but the "no blackouts" thing is big. Nothing drives me more crazy than being unable to stream a game because I happen to live in the same geographic region as the team home field. This would finally motivate me to cancel the cable TV subscription - the only sport I watch is soccer, and the only reason I keep the cable TV is so I can dig out the remote whenever the dumb blackout rules prevent me from watching it via streaming.

View on HN

> but the "no blackouts" thing is big

Wow missed that - very big deal

I have the MLB package and blackouts drive me nuts - I’m not even in the Bay Area, but close enough to not be able to watch Giants or A’s home games,

Than it’s already starting to fragment: some Friday games on AppleTV, some weekend games on Peacock

And MLB.tv doesn’t carry playoff games

It is really annoying that MLB.TV has gone the route with games on other providers. I don't want to create another account or install some other app on my TV or phone for a few games a season. At least the radio broadcasts still work on mlb.com when it happens.

It's the teams' faults and not the network. Most franchises that have blackouts have negotiated exclusive broadcast rights in their local markets.

I think it’s fair to bundle that into “it’s MLB’s fault”

MLB has consolidated a lot of the teams’ media properties under its umbrella

A long time ago they restricted radio stations from distributing baseball games online for example

But they double-dip on TV:

- Allow blackouts to increase revenue from local TV - Sell MLB.TV

MLB.tv is way way too expensive for any blackouts to even be legal. Kind of an outrage.

> This would finally motivate me to cancel the cable TV subscription

Which is exactly why blackouts exist. Live tv is pretty much solely about sports and 24 hour news channels now. The big four sports leagues all make billions a year off their TV deals. Giving up blackouts would absolutely hamstring them.

Hard to believe the other leagues will give up blackouts until they are confident they can run their own streaming service and cash in on that micro gambling revenue. Can you imagine how much money the NFL would make if people were gambling $.10-1 on every play?

As I understand it, blackouts primarily exist to ensure local ticket sales for full stadiums.

"In most cases, the blackout results when a sports league prohibits an event from being televised locally if the event did not sell out all its tickets."

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/sports-blackouts#:~:tex....)

So I think we're referring to different blackouts. I believe OP was complaining that streaming services such as NBA league pass never show your local team. If you want to watch your team you need a cable subscription. That's different than your local TV station not showing the game because it didn't sell out.

Correct: I was complaining about the rules that prevent streaming and force you to watch the game on live TV. Has nothing to do with ticket sales.

Wait, what? Why does this exist again?

Leagues, like the NBA and MLB, sell in-market broadcast rights to regional sports networks (an RSN), which gives the RSN exclusive rights to broadcast that game to in-market users. These RSNs typically only show their broadcast through cable packages, which is why local users would need to subscribe to cable packages that carry the RSN that holds the rights to their local team. However, some RSNs (at least in baseball) are starting to build direct to consumer streaming products. NESN, the RSN that carries the Boston Red Sox, has come out with NESN 360 which allows users to stream Red Sox games without a cable package at a price point of $30/month [1].

Leagues retain out-of-market broadcast rights and serve those to out of market users through their streaming platforms like MLB.tv and NBA League Pass.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/01/red-sox-broadcaster-to-offer...

Live sports is the only reason tons of people pay $80+ a month for cable. The majority of my close friends have a cable subscription solely to watch basketball and monday night football. If those people could switch to streaming services to see their team cable would be even more fucked than they already are, so broadcast rights with blackouts are worth billions. The leagues don't think they'd be able to make that up with increased streaming revenue.

So of course, part of the deal is to give away the subscription to MLS season ticket holders.

Yes. And that used to be a worthwhile effort. However, given all the choices consumers have today it's saying "go away. We don't want you." The MLB can't afford to lose more top of mind market share, especially to the younger audience.

These days blackouts on streaming services are due to exclusive broadcast rights on local networks. Teams aren't (usually) dumb enough to black out the entire region because of bad ticket sales. They learned that it creates a negative feedback loop that kills the local fan base, the Chicago Blackhawks are a good case study.

> the dumb blackout rules prevent me from watching it via streaming

The blackout MLS rules are really dumb. For example, I het my normal TV through DirecTV stream. My local MLS club (FC Cincinnati) airs their local broadcast on a local over the air channel. This channel is also on my DirecTV subscription.

However, because I get my “TV” streamed over the internet and not through a satellite dish or cable, all local MLS games were blacked out for me. I pay for local TV access, but even when the game was broadcast over the air, I would get blacked out because of how I got the TV access.

This was just dumb.

I specifically got a network OTA tuner just for this purpose, but getting rid of blackout rules entirely would be fantastic.

MLB next, please. I don't have cable, which means I just don't watch baseball right now. I would 100% sign up for MLB.tv if I could watch my two favorite teams play.

Yep. Fortunately I don't live in the same state as my baseball team anymore. So I watch just about all their games through MLB.tv. Would be so frustrating if I lived near my team though.

I live a good 3 hour drive from my team and I am blacked out all the time. It's infuriating.

The teams I want to watch are 6 and 4 hours (3 and 2 states) away.

Edit: Here is a blackout map to see what teams are blacked out where: https://library.sportingnews.com/2021-08/mlb-blackout-map-em...

For the Blue Jays, the blackout applies to the entire country. And there are certain geographic badluck regions in the US where one can get blacked out from several teams despite not being close to them. Especially when it's a national broadcast [1]

Also, the marketing at MLB used to be really bad a few years ago -- it seemed to be deliberately targeting home team fans and leaving out the fact that they would not be able to watch their home team.

[1] https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/sports/baseball/2021...

"Currently, six MLB teams are blacked out all across Iowa: the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago White Sox, Minnesota Twins, Kansas City Royals and Milwaukee Brewers. Those teams are not available to watch with an MLB.tv subscription or when they are often aired on national broadcasts. Some of those clubs are not available on Iowa’s main cable packages either."

"Additionally, some parts of Iowa are more than 500 miles from several of those blacked-out MLB teams."

Things get pretty hilarious when you live in a city with two sports teams and they happen to be playing each other. Every year, Cubs/Sox Crosstown Classic for example.

It's so dumb. Since I live in a different market from my favorite team, I can watch every game they play, unless it involves a local team. :-|

I don't watch baseball, but I always assumed MLB.tv and NHL.tv used the same technology.

The way NHL.tv used to work, the blackout check would be done when you opened the stream. So you could connect to a VPN in, say, Germany, start the stream, then disconnect the VPN and after a brief interruption the playback would continue. If you did the VPN connection from your router you could stream from any device, too.

Funny thing, the ads always seemed to know exactly what market you were in.

NHL used to use MLBAM. Now the NHL package goes through ESPN+.

It's s bit annoying and prob some extra money but i get around this with a VPN service.

Not sure about MLS, but the MLB is extremely aggressive at blocking most VPN providers.

Not only no blackouts but afaik, we'll be able to stream all games after the fact.

ESPN, MLS' current partner, is mediocre at best.

Now if only the PHL Union can replace JP Dellecamera. Somehow he manages to make The Beautiful Game sound ugly.

I always thought that was silly. Games sell out, that doesn’t mean local fans still don’t want to watch.

> I always thought that was silly. Games sell out, that doesn’t mean local fans still don’t want to watch.

Do they still do blackouts if the game sells out? I'm not a sports fan, but I thought games would only get blacked out if they didn't sell enough in-person tickets.

Not sure on that. I just remember living about a mile from a large college stadium that always sells out. I tried to watch the game on TV and got denied. This was a while back, I'm not a huge sports fan, but that stuck with me and made me not want to bother trying to watch any future games.

The fact that the game is local, makes it more interesting to me to watch on TV. I'm not a big sports fan, I am highly unlikely to ever go to a game... but they might get my viewership on a live stream, just to see what's going on near by, or to have a get together at my house and have a game on.

But my experience pretty much mirrors yours. Any time I might be interested in seeing a game, it's been blacked out on TV. So I never bothered to watch anything else. Why would I give a shit about a team not even near me if I'm not a huge fan to begin with?

The NFL stopped that in 2014. I’m unaware of any league that still does blackouts like this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_tel...

The local/in-market rights are sold independent of out of market rights. The local rights are held by channels typically part of Cable TV, that is why there is blackouts the streaming app usually won't have rights to show you the game in that region, the cable channels do, those channels(RSNs) pay more because they focus more on 1-2 regions and also this is primary reason those packages sell so they cannot afford not to loose the deal, the streaming apps have a lot of regions to cover nationally and other usage drivers so will not be able to pay same price.

The kind of blackouts you describe is still common in U.K. to encourage you to go and support the local team rather than the big regional team because that is on TV. Think Wigan Athletic or Bolton Wanderers instead of Manchester United

English football has 11-21 tiers and strong grassroots. Those blackouts are not designed for big teams to sell tickets they will anyway sell out, but to help the smaller teams which are rarely featured on TV, not in the top premier league but play instead in Championship, league 1,2, or non conference leagues etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com