Regional Sports Networks Going Bankrupt

Charter Spectrum, I would think.

 

I cut DirecTV seven years ago after 10+ years of $5 rate hikes every year. That was after I wheedled better rates twice by threatening to cut. I finally gave up and cut the cord.

 

Yeah, once the pine trees grew up higher than I could move the dish, I said so long to DirecTV. Too expensive and I lost the signal every time the wind blew.

 

Interesting bit on NPR's Marketplace about teams moving games back to local network affiliates - more potential audience/ad revenue than local cable.

 

https://www.nexttv.com/news/diamond...ge-rules-as-nba-and-nhl-express-more-concerns

 

The article says the judge believes that Diamond does not have a viable plan going forward and gave the company six weeks to come up with one.

I ma not a bankruptcy lawyer but I wonder at what point the judge would order the company liquidated.,

 

The stubbornness of these people is criminal -- you aren't on DISH network because you want stupid prices.

There are at least six million DISH subscribers based on late 2023 numbers. Charge a dollar carriage fee per subscriber. At minimum, they have thrown away 250 million. And there are people who would return / subscribe if it was available. And that's just DISH. Comcast is more than twice that number.

 

Bad example. Dish dropped the Bally RSNs in 2019 (they were still the Fox Sports regionals at the time) and dropped the rest as carriage agreements expired..

 

Maybe I don't understand but they dropped them because they wanted outrageous fees. And Bally's hasn't budged at all. And they are losing 10s of millions in the process.

 

The last regional sports network on Dish was NESN (Red Sox, Bruins), dropped late in 2021. At the time, Dish TV president Brian Neylon said “The current Regional Sports Network (RSN) model is fundamentally broken," citing high fees and few viewers. Of course, most channels have few viewers, but charge much less. Neylon kept national sports networks, which also have high fees, but subscribers continue to flee. In the last quarter of 2023, parent EchoStar lost $2 billion. Do that enough quarters, and you won't be around for the next quarter.

 

Every major league baseball team has a cable contract worth at least 40 million dollars a year and some make a lot more. Just as an estimate let's say that the total revenues of the 29 MLB teams from their local cable contracts in the United States is a combined two billion dollars annually. This works out to each team making about $400,000 a game on broadcast rights, in very rough numbers..

In the United States (I don't have Canadian data) the combined total number of average viewers for MLB baseball in 2021 was 1.8 million per game (this may be paywalled).

MLB Seeing Local TV Households Decline Dramatically Compared With Last Full Season

This works out to about 60,000 viewers per team per game, in very rough numbers. That means MLB teams are receiving more than six dollars per game for each viewer they deliver.
MLB in local markets almost always crushes the NBA and the NHL in local ratings,

My estimates are incredibly rough. But I think it is clear that professional sports teams in the NHL, NBA and NHL are being paid a lot of money to deliver relatively small audiences to cable providers. When cable television had a 90% household penetration and the ability to increase prices by twice the rate of inflation annually I am not sure the big cable providers cared. But in 2024 cable providers are looking at declining subscriber bases and are going to be a lot more selective.