No MLB Network? Then No Game for You!

To everyone saying "all you need is YouTubeTV and Hulu and Blahblahblah". You also need high speed internet. Not everyone has the ability to do that at home. Why in the snot are these games not on free over-the-air TV? With digital subchannels that should be easy.

It's not a matter of OTA space. Have you seen what's on most digital subchannels? It's not a place where networks want to place any content of value (either MLB baseball or the primetime programming it would displace).

I love OTA TV, but baseball (and basketball, and hockey -- basically everything but the NFL) are cable sports, and have been for a very long time. Most anyone with any interest in the Twins or baseball already knows that, so they're already prepared. The biggest bandwagon jumpers probably won't get on until the World Series anyway, which will still be OTA. (Some ALCS games might be OTA too.)

Edit to add: also, internet doesn't have to be too "high speed". I've got a pretty limited connection, but I've been able to stream MLB.TV and other services just fine (albeit not usually at max quality).

Here's an old article on the MLB Network strategy:

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/mlb-network-playoff-gamble-pays-off-aids-viewers/

They've done free previews for each of the last 4 postseasons. I don't think they are being particularly unreasonable or fan unfriendly in this instance.

If this is the ball we want to play with consumers, give consumers a direct choice. I will pay MLB $5/mo for MLB Network separately and stream it through MLB.tv. Easy-peasy, no muss, no fuss.

That's not realistic. Relatively few people would sign up for that, compared to the number that already get it through their TV provider, and a direct offering would diminish the value of the network so those providers would drop it and MLB would lose their revenue.

And even if your $5 per head could make up the subscriber revenue, in the end it would put MLB in front of a vastly smaller audience.

This argument reminds me of the "MLB.TV should have no blackouts!" crowd. Networks currently pay BILLIONS for the exclusive rights that lead to those blackouts -- and there's no way MLB.TV subscribers would ever be numerous enough, and/or pay enough, to replace those billions.

Do you realize how powerful the MLBAM tech has become? Disney literally bought them to power the coming behemoth that is Disney+. That's how good the tech is and if you look at what it powers, you'll realize that MLB created something pretty special when they decided to go down this road almost 20 years ago.

 

I'm not saying they need to eliminate the package push, I'm saying they could slot in the $5/mo package with so little difficulty that it's a no-brainer. Add a simple package into MLB.tv and it's done. That's it. The entire infrastructure exists to do this and it's more than flipping a switch, but not a lot more.

 

But no, let's not break the mold. Let's just keep pushing this same system that has made more and more viewers leave over the past decade and abandon sports as a whole.

 

It's a bad system. Offer an alternative. 

 

This is why I was soooo hopeful that Amazon - despite me hating them quite a bit - would buy Fox's sports division. They would have absolutely destroyed this mold that is begging to be destroyed.

It's not an infrastructure issue at all. I agree it would be easy, technology-wise, for MLB to offer MLB Network for streaming. (Just like it would be easy, technology-wise, for Fox to put an MLB game on an OTA digital subchannel.)

But it's not a practical business decision right now. Providers would drop MLB Network if MLB was selling it to customers directly (after all, they're not going to pay X cents per subscriber when the people who really care about the channel are already getting it elsewhere), and it doesn't matter how powerful MLBAM is -- there's no way that the niche audience of us diehards would make up the lost revenue *and* the lost eyeballs/exposure/accessibility/etc. MLB already has most diehards hooked, one way or another -- with MLB Network, they want to get their channel in front of lots of non-fans too. Look at the free previews they've done in the postseason -- four years in a row.

TV ratings are down, but I don't think that many people are "abandoning sports as a whole." Sports are still huge. The landscape is evolving, and competition is growing, but they're still huge, and MLB would be pretty much alone in abandoning major TV providers to sell direct to the consumer right now, and would likely suffer for it.

I do agree about Amazon -- I too was hoping they'd get the Fox RSNs, and at least offer them in something close to Sling's base package price. Maybe it wouldn't have made financial sense, but it would have been fun, with much greater importance than however MLB chooses to distribute their MLB Network.

Second, I'm not sure providers will care if a channel is offering a streaming service to users at an inflated price. The crossover there is limited. If a provider is charging $10/mo for ten channels and MLB is charging $5/mo to stream, where is the real crossover there? Cord-cutters are already operating under a different demographic so the overlap is small. It's not as if Comcast is going to lose much by not selling to a demographic that isn't using their service in the first place.

$5 is an inflated price?

How many networks sell their channels directly to the consumer, as well as have wide cable carriage? It doesn't happen, and it's not because all networks are dumb. It's a tight business and Comcast and others aren't going to pay any carriage fees they don't have to.

$5/mo is not an inflated price if you already have the infrastructure built and in place, which is why I brought up MLBAM and MLB.tv in the first place.

 

Or maybe you think MLBN gets more money than that by bundling into a $10/mo package with 12 other stations?

 

Again, I don't think you appreciate how easy it is to pull in something like this to the MLBAM tech. They don't do it because they don't want to, not because it's not feasible or, god forbid, easy. They are sticking themselves in playing the existing game, which is a game of diminishing returns and user refusal.

 

At some point in the near future, this is all going to implode. They could have gotten out in front of that but they're not. They continue to play this losing game of forcing users into doing things they don't want to do.

 

Remember that MLBAM actually *broke* this idea in the early going with streaming tech in the first place (which is why they're a LEADER now), yet they're not pushing forward with it.

 

Without MLBAM, where would we even be with sports streaming? And how many "bridges did they burn" by doing that? Do you think that networks just laid down and accepted that MLB would stream baseball games over the internet in 2002, completely circumventing the entire cable subscription network in the process?

 

Yet MLBAM is doing just fine today, don't you think?

Brock, I've repeatedly said there is no *technical* issue preventing this. I know it would be easy for MLB to flip a switch and stream it from their servers. I appreciate that! But that's not the issue at all. I don't know where you got the idea that I thought that was the issue.

First off, Wikipedia says cable and satellite companies were offered a minority share in the network, so it may not be exclusively MLB's decision to make. I guess MLB could buy them out, but that's just going to risk it getting dropped by providers.

Here's an article that had MLB Network in 67 million households, at $0.28 each:

https://sportstvratings.com/how-much-more-does-espn-make-in-affiliate-revenue-than-the-other-sports-networks/5737/

If providers decided to offer just 8 cents less for MLB Network, it would take a million standalone subscribers at $5 per month to make up the lost revenue.

(And most of those subscribers would only subscribe for October, or at best April through October, so you'd probably need a lot more than 1 million of them. And if you made the single-month price higher, like $20, or $60 for the year, you can imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the folks on this thread.)

And I suspect it wouldn't just be an 8 cents across the board cut -- some providers would simply drop it, or for providers who don't already have it, they would be less likely to add it in the future, or even go along with MLB on this "free preview" thing.

MLB Network (and MLB.TV) are not big revenue generators, they are primarily promotional tools. Look at the free previews, the low carriage rates, the numerous free and discounted MLB.TV subscriptions, the limited number of unique MLB.TV commercials. Selling MLB Network directly to superfans has minimal revenue potential, and a lot of risk that it would constrict their promotional reach.

Look at what happened here -- with this game on MLB Network, there were news articles about MLB Network, and lots of folks petitioned Comcast about it and even got them to reverse a decision (albeit just about the free preview.) The same might happen in Houston and Tampa for their upcoming ALDS game on MLB Network.

That's what MLB wants to happen, rather than essentially selling this single game's stream for a couple bucks to us cordcutters. And it makes sense in the current environment. No one in their position is selling a la carte or bypassing providers and going direct to the consumer with that level of content. Someday it might make sense, but at this point, the criticism seems more like wishing than any kind of questionable decision on MLB's part.

I love baseball. I love the MN Twins. I loved MLB network when I could get it. I now support my small local cable company. I contacted them yesterday about getting MLB Network. They said MLB Network will NOT ALLOW them to even get it. The exact words were "MLB doesn't care about small markets and cable companies so they won't even allow us to get it." If this is true it's very sad. MLB has lost a great deal of viewership over the years. One would think you wouldn't want to lose more. 

 

Sent the above letter to MLB today.

I understand your frustration, but I'd take that with a grain of salt. I know MLB Network is available on some smaller cable companies -- they even have a web site where you can check:

https://www.mlb.com/network/get-mlb-network

Was this in reference to the free preview? I could see logistical problems with trying to offer that to lots of small providers. As for regular carriage, MLB and cable providers might disagree about what tier to offer the channel on too, aside from cost.

Out of curiosity, what is your cable company?

Also, to those saying "MLB is bad for spreading their postseason games across too many networks" -- the only two MLB Network games are on the only two days of the postseason when there are FOUR games going on. By comparison, the NFL playoffs never have more than 2 games in a day, and the length of those games is mostly fixed.

Given the variable lengths of these MLB games, those are probably the best days to spread them out across networks as much as possible. I remember 1995, when MLB tried overlapping postseason broadcasts, and they were pilloried for it!