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Comment by colinmhayes | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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