Twins Video
It's the announcement that feels finally a decade in the making: Minnesotans can finally stream Twins games.
As the Bally Sports bankruptcy court threw a wrench in recent weeks, three teams—the Twins, Guardians, and Brewers—have officially partnered with MLB for broadcasts in 2025. This follows the same track that the Diamondbacks, Rockies, and Padres followed last year. As Dave St. Peter told the media, "This will eliminate all blackouts as we've come to know and hate them."
The Twins have thus announced Twins.TV, an MLB-run streaming service for the games. The spine of this will be a direct-to-consumer subscription, which will likely follow the same pricing structure as teams sold them for last year—$20 for a month or $100 for the season. For those who already subscribe to MLB.tv and want the full in- and out-of-market experience, the price tag will be higher, but the difference from what you were already paying might be minimal.
Beyond that, the team will likely partner with most major cable services—including Xfinity—for those who remain cable subscribers. As noted in the press release, the Twins should now be available to 4.4 million fans within their projected area, compared to less than a quarter of that in 2024.
But that newfound reach comes with a price. A million people paid for access to Twins games as part of their monthly cable bill, whether they wanted it or not. Companies like Xfinity and DirecTV paid the network carriage fees, then passed the costs to their subscribers. Now, the Twins will face a darker question: Just how popular are they, when fans need to opt in rather than out--and when the price they're paying is suddenly much more visible to them?
The Twins reportedly received around 80% of their 2023 intake of $54 million to remain with Bally Sports North for 2024, implying a take around $40 million. That will be hard to match, at least in the short term. Even St. Peter acknowledged that in his remarks Tuesday.
The Padres scored around 40,000 subscribers on their direct-to-consumer service last year, which would generate revenues around $5 million. The Minnesota area is certainly bigger than San Diego, though it's also a space where the Twins have to compete against quite a few more sports for attention. Many are already cutting streaming services left and right; is $20 a month for a single team enticing enough?
That's not all the money, of course, with various deals being made with the cable providers. San Diego had perhaps five different ones, though details on how much they yielded were scarce. That slice of the pie figures to be tiny. We're talking, now, about the league going to the carriers with hat in hand, needing to get their channel aired. They don't have a package of sports that can deliver year-round content, or even 24-hour supplemental content around the games, to offer. It's unlikely the carriage fees associated with this model will be even 10 percent of what Bally could command, though we're obviously doing an apples and oranges thing there. Nonetheless, there will be some money beyond the raw DTC revenues. Furthermore, MLB and the Players Association recently struck a deal to send more money to teams in this situation, though the specifics again are unclear.
The Rockies might give us a better sense of what might happen to the Twins, given they are currently valued similarly by Forbes. According to research, Colorado's switch over from their broadcast deal with AT&T to MLB cost the team about $55 million in annual value.
If you thus figure the Twins to lose $30-40 million in value tied in with their broadcast rights, you might also have a very good idea where they may have already balanced those books. St. Peter isn't expecting the lost cashflow to further reduce payroll, because the team reduced its payroll to match the new reality a year early. The president informed reporters he expects less money than what Ballys provided in 2024, and Joe Pohlad's recent comments had already planned for this announcement. In effect, last year's slash was about this very eventuality.
The big question is whether this is too late. The Twins had this same opportunity last year. Now, they lost fans to that lower payroll, as well as an Xfinity blackout that kept them off TV for three months and a disastrous September collapse. Twins fans might have made their peace with the drop in payroll, in exchange for being able to stream games the way the team initially promised. Instead, they got the stick without the carrot for a full year, and it turned a lot of people off. The team is now in a pretty different position than are the Brewers, Diamondbacks, Guardians, or Padres, mostly because of those clubs' better on-field performances.
The best way to get fans to subscribe may simply be to win games and a lot of them.
On the broader side, Manfred continues to bring teams into his fold, with six teams secured and more likely to follow. The Texas Rangers also announced the end of their partnership with Bally, but have decided to explore production and distribution options that might present themselves locally, rather than lump in with the league. The Tigers and Royals, like the Guardians, are still playing postseason games, and unlike the Guardians, they have a contract with Diamond Sports Group to stay on their local flavors of Bally Sports through next year. However, it wouldn't be surprising at all if that deal were vacated, given Diamond's recent indications in court, and at that point, both Detroit and Kansas City could come inside the tent, too.
Ultimately, the league would like to be able to bundle and sell streaming packages featuring all of its teams directly, but they need way more clubs to be dependent on them before that can happen. Nor does it make much sense to plunge forward with that project sans many of the biggest draws in the sports. Huge contracts paying hundreds of millions to big-market behemoths still stand in the way of that happening. In other words, until top teams like the Dodgers or Yankees run out of ways to make orders of magnitude more than the teams leaning on the league will get, the package deal is a non-starter, and solutions are likely to remain piecemeal.
All of MLB will be facing a war for eyeballs, and now the Twins are going to be front and center of that battle. Those eyeballs all mean money, so winning those battles and skirmishes will be essential. The Twins' medium-term spending power depends on it.
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