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My concerns, then, are not about the short term. Everyone is going to find some kind of TV home. It will be better for some fans, especially the ones who have complained for years about what have been deemed “blackouts.” (They’re not, any more than KFC blacks you out of buying a Big Mac.) It could, and we’ll get to this later this winter, start to reconnect on-field success with profitability. MLB may be able to cobble enough streaming rights together to at least experiment with a full in-market product. It is going to have opportunities to do live tests of pricing and packaging and marketing.
In the long term, though, I’m not sure this is sustainable. That Yankee deal with MSG 35 years ago kicked off three decades of complaining, and even the massive amount of revenue sharing that occurs today has not quieted that. In 2022, the top five teams by TV revenue earned about four times what the bottom five did. In 2025, the top five is going to out-earn the bottom five by a factor of 20. There is no path by which streaming revenue returns a fraction of RSN revenue in the short or medium term, so this problem is going to be persistent and will probably grow. Manfred wants to put MLB on a path to one-stop streaming, all 30 teams with no local blackouts, and he can’t get there when the local TV rights of a third of MLB teams are worth more than $100 million a year, while a third are worth almost nothing.
In the long term, though, I’m not sure this is sustainable. That Yankee deal with MSG 35 years ago kicked off three decades of complaining, and even the massive amount of revenue sharing that occurs today has not quieted that. In 2022, the top five teams by TV revenue earned about four times what the bottom five did. In 2025, the top five is going to out-earn the bottom five by a factor of 20. There is no path by which streaming revenue returns a fraction of RSN revenue in the short or medium term, so this problem is going to be persistent and will probably grow. Manfred wants to put MLB on a path to one-stop streaming, all 30 teams with no local blackouts, and he can’t get there when the local TV rights of a third of MLB teams are worth more than $100 million a year, while a third are worth almost nothing.
