Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

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I hope that whoever the executives are over at the MLB who decided that blacking out games on streaming services was a good idea, are well into their 60s and 70s and will be dying or retiring soon.

I lived a ten minute walk from the Cubs' stadium and really wanted to watch every game. I moved to Chicago the year before they won the world series and got to experience all the build up, so was extremely excited to follow them.

But even though I had a MLB.tv subscription, from T-Mobile, it was completely useless the entire time I lived in Chicago. The Cubs' games were on an over the air network, WGN, for decades, so I had to spend money for a one time expense of an antennae to be privileged to watch some games and the added inconvenience of switching away from my streaming box.

Soon after they won the world series, they moved to a cable only network Marquee. I would have been forced to pay for cable to get the same shitty experience of watching only some games. I ended up only ever watching games I was physically at or when a game aligned with the exact time I happened to be at a bar with it on in the background.

Blackout rules feel like a completely untenable situation if baseball wants anyone under 45 to get in to the sport.

You're completely right, and as a baseball fan myself I deeply sympathize, but it's not so much MLB that is the problem (today) but the patchwork of cable-based Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) that have contracts for exclusive broadcast rights from MLB that were inked years ago. In a lot of cases teams even have ownership stakes in their own RSN. So now all the local broadcast rights (and $$$) belong to these RSNs instead of MLB themselves. And most/all of them broadcast exclusively on cable and offer limited-to-no streaming options.

There's been some hinting from MLB that they know blackouts are painful for fans, but without being able to alter/cancel the RSN contracts they're up shit creek, legally speaking.

What's interesting right now is that Diamond Sports Group (Bally Sports) just recently declared bankruptcy and they own/operate the RSNs for almost half of MLB teams. They are behind on their rights payments and MLB is trying to forcibly get broadcast rights back so they can presumably stream on mlb.tv. If that happens it could give MLB some power and put the issue more front and center. Maybe. Here's hoping.

And I don't mean to white knight MLB here, they made this bed for themselves by making exclusive deals with RSNs in the past. But now it's not as easy as MLB just ending blackouts by decree. Not without a lot of lawsuits.

But someday it has to happen. For the good of the game and fanbase. Please be soon.

Seems like Marquee has some relationship to Bally and Sinclair so hopefully the bankruptcy helps. But it is absolutely disgusting to me that the network was created just to make it harder to watch Cubs' games so they could make more money after decades of them being free to watch. It wasn't some old regional network deal, the network was created in 2020 when cord cutting was well underway.

Oof that's dumb as hell I didn't realize it was such a recent deal

>Blackout rules feel like a completely untenable situation if baseball wants anyone under 45 to get in to the sport.

It's crazy thinking about baseball growing up. It was just on TV. Or it was on the Radio. Or it was in the newspaper. Either way, it was everywhere you looked during baseball season. These days its a different world. People don't subscribe to the newspaper and see the big win on the front page anymore. They don't listen to AM radio swing by swing while they drive, cut grass, watch their kids, operate the cash register at work, doing whatever with the game on. It was so amazingly unavoidably accessible.

These days its totally locked down. You can't fire up any TV you encounter and get to the game in a few presses of a remote anymore. You can't be sure you'd see the game when you'd go out in bars, much less overhear anyone's AM radio. Executives forgot why baseball became America's pasttime: because it was in your god damn face all the time! It's like making friends, you tend to make friends with the people life happens to have you spend more time with, like your classmates or coworkers you spend the bulk of the day with. Baseball is really in a death spiral with the direction of the current mlb office IMO. And that is to say nothing about the actual state of the game of baseball (various hardly punished cheating scandals, favoritism in officiating, juiced balls, etc).

I had an MLB.tv subscription for many years, paying like $140 a year. In the UK, so nothing was blacked out... great... except last year find out they sold post-season rights to BT Sport so nothing in the post-season was available live AT ALL on MLB.tv in the UK. Forget it, did not renew this year.

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