DirecTV, AT&T Customers Will Finally Get to See LA Dodgers Games — Once Baseball Season Starts

And now, for a bit of what I hope is legitimately good news:

DirecTV, U-verse and AT&T TV customers will finally get to watch Los Angeles Dodgers games again, after six years of blackout. AT&T and Spectrum Networks have announced a carriage deal that will bring the Dodgers’ regional sports network, Spectrum SportsNet LA, to those subscribers for the first time.

DirecTV/AT&T and Spectrum had failed to come to an agreement for six years, which left the Dodgers with only partial coverage in the Los Angeles market. Under the new deal, DirecTV customers will receive SportsNet LA starting today on channel 690, while AT&T TV and AT&T TV Now customers will start to see the channel on April 8.

The news comes, however, as the baseball season has been delayed due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

“This agreement underscores our commitment to provide all Dodgers fans the opportunity to enjoy our award-winning programming and live game coverage,” said Dan Finnerty, Senior Vice President, Spectrum Networks. “Working together with AT&T, we were able to reach an agreement to offer the region’s most popular teams to local fans across AT&T’s video platforms.”

Sports Networks Should Focus on Nostalgia During This Time: TRAINA THOUGHTS

Jumping to the most relevant content:

1. Dear ESPN, Fox Sports, NBC Sports Network, CBS Sports Network and any other sports network I may have missed: I know I’ve already provided you with a list of 10 shows/events I’d love to see you re-air, but since I have so much time on my hands these days, I have another request.

I know you are in a very tough spot right now trying to fill hours and hours of programming, and I sympathize with the fact having no live sports has left you in a difficult bind, so I’m not here to criticize. I’m here to help with some free advice.

When re-airing games, please stick to the ‘80s and ‘90s as much as possible. I’m sure this isn’t easy because of rights fees and contractual issues, but I beg you to do what you can.

....

Over the weekend, MLB Network aired games from the classic Mets-Astros 1986 playoff series. It was glorious. ABC’s Keith Jackson doing the play-by-play, batters who didn’t step out of the box for five minutes at a time, outfield walls without advertisements. Bring us back to that.

1980s and 1990s? My hopes are for the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s- in part because I’m curious to know what from those decades survives in the network vaults, and now seems the best time to answer that question.

MLB Isn’t Losing TV Revenues Yet

Underpinning the agreement between the players and owners about how to approach this season is an acknowledgement that revenues are going to be down in 2020, no matter when this season starts. To start, the season itself is in jeopardy as the country and world deals with the COVID-19 pandemic. And even if games are played, there are likely to be fewer than the typical 162; some of those games might not have any fans in physical attendance at all. Baseball teams are bound to take a huge loss at the gate compared to previous years. Whether MLB and its individual teams will take similar losses with their television partners isn’t as clear.

Before getting to the television money, though, let’s do a quick hypothetical on ticket sales. Forbes estimated thatin 2018, MLB teams took in around $2.8 billion at the gate. If teams play a half slate of games this year, and get half as much money at the gate in those games, we end up with $700 million in gate receipts and roughly $2 billion in revenue losses over a typical season. Now, if players receive only half their salaries, those losses basically even out. That isn’t to say that there aren’t a large number of associated revenue losses that will keep MLB teams from turning a profit, but even a massive loss at the gate wouldn’t create huge losses for MLB teams by itself. It’s losing television money that would create those losses.

MLB has three relevant national television contracts that amount to around $1.7 billion in yearly revenues, which are split among the 30 teams. There is roughly another $1 billion that comes from the central offices that is split among teams, per Forbes, but that revenue comes from MLB-owned properties like MLB Network, MLB.TV and MLB.com. The television deals are with FOX, TBS, and ESPN. While FOX and TBS air regular season games, most of the value in those contracts for the networks comes in the postseason, as well as the All-Star Game. FOX puts many games on FS1, but those games are on FS1 to gain the network subscribers rather than for advertising; the network suffers very little in terms of actual losses. In addition, FOX’s contract with MLB has already been extended through 2028, providing both groups incentive to work well together. TBS also airs some regular season games, but the bulk of the contract comes from air playoff games, which have yet to be impacted.

ESPN airs a single Wild Card game in the playoffs, so the loss of regular season games will impact the network and its deal. ESPN has been paying roughly $700 million a year to air more than 100 regular season games as part of a deal that expires in 2021. While ESPN makes a lot of money on subscriber fees, it also draws revenues from advertising, which they are currently missing out on. (It is worth noting that advertising money never comes close to equaling what the networks pay for MLB rights due to its penchant for demanding high per subscriber fees, and networks advertising their other shows, particularly on FOX.)

A few remarks on the economics of broadcasting under current conditions.

Missing Baseball? One Classic Game for Every Fan to Rewatch

Get your baseball fix by spending a few hours watching an all-time game from your favorite team. We didn’t specifically try to choose the best or most iconic or most memorable game, just a game you wish you could flick on the TV right now to see.

A few of those games are embedded below, but every club has a classic game linked below the team name. Enjoy.

And, on a positive note, there’s a bit more range here than in some similar lists I’ve seen, especially given the limitations of what survives and is easily accessible.

Baseball fix: Recent classic games to watch during the coronavirus shutdown

With baseball delayed indefinitely, and people around the world working from home to stem the spread of the coronavirus, entertainment options are a must. Major League Baseball’s 2020 season isn’t coming Thursday, as originally planned. We don’t know when or if it will arrive, really, and we certainly don’t know what it will look like if it does.

But we know the familiar daily comforts and thrills that usually come with spring are missing. Television networks, including MLB Network (which will show the famous 1978 Bucky Dent game several times on Saturday), are providing some access to old favorites, but the more choices the better.

We assembled a list of instant classics — regular season games of recent vintage, in this first edition — that you can watch on YouTube or with that MLB.TV subscription you had already bought in anticipation of your team’s upcoming season.

So, what games from 2018 and 2019 would you chose for the rest of us to watch?

Twilight Time: Long-lost Rod Serling baseball comedy on deck

Years before he journeyed to “The Twilight Zone,” Rod Serling made a brief detour to the strike zone.

To many, he’s the foreboding figure in black and white who gave the world the heebie-jeebies with those bizarre, mind-bending tales of cannibal aliens, talking dolls and phone calls from the grave.

Smoldering cigarette in hand, he unleashed macabre mayhem in a classic TV show that resonates decades later in endless reruns.

“That’s how a lot of people pictured Dad,” daughter Anne Serling said.

Something of interest to listen to- as a fan of both baseball and radio drama, this sort of combination doesn’t seem to come around much.

Networks adjusting to life without live sporting events

Burke Magnus has always had a challenging job as ESPN’s head of programming, trying to juggle live events among ESPN’s various channels.

But Magnus, as well as other programming directors, is facing possibly the biggest task of his career now – how to schedule with no live sports on the horizon for the foreseeable future because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“There are so many creative things we can do, similar to some of the initiatives we’ve done in the past for special event anniversaries, ‘The Ocho’ day and more,” Magnus said in a Q&A with ESPN’s company blog. “The challenge is that now we need to replicate that dynamic 24 hours a day, seven days a week across multiple networks. That’s what is in front of us in terms of long-range planning.”

CBS, TNT and TBS were able to quickly adjust after the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament. On what would have been the tournament’s first round Thursday, CBS will air game shows during the afternoon and its usual prime time shows while TNT and TBS will air its usual shows as well as movies.

MLB risks losing casual fans with shuffling streaming rights and TV blackouts

One of the first stories I planned to do when I started this job exactly a year ago was on the state of the MLB.tv blackouts. I put out a call on Twitter for testimonials of frustration and received over 100 detailed emails.

They were lashing out against the absurdities of certain far-ranging and overlapping blackouts that leave pockets of the country unable to watch as many as six different teams on the app, sometimes despite having no actual option to watch those teams on local cable. Or else they were lamenting the more intrinsic, common issue of wanting to cut the cable cord while continuing to watch their hometown team. Alienating people who have that kind of fervent eagerness to engage with baseball — specifically by preventing them from doing so — seemed like the epitome of MLB’s oft short-sighted self-sabotage. It felt urgent.

Here’s what happened to that story: Someone at actual Major League Baseball suggested I just get YouTube TV in addition to my MLB.tv subscription. I did that and it solved my personal problems with accessing almost every game for all 30 baseball teams. And so I didn’t write that story in part because the solution seemed simple enough but more honestly because, pretty quickly, the idea of not being able to consume enough baseball content seemed very far away from my life.

But now YouTube TV might not have Yankees games this year because it has been unable to reach an agreement with Sinclair Broadcast Group, which last year purchased 21 regional sports networks (14 of which are the local outlet for MLB teams) and the right to control Yankees’ and Cubs’ distribution. YES Network’s website says it is “not optimistic” about its future on YouTube TV and suggests switching to a different streaming service. Probably that’s what I’ll do. Adding the $55 per month Hulu with Live TV to my growing collection of subscription streaming services. It’s a luxury and necessity of this particular job.

MLB’s Winning and Losing Efforts to Conquer TV, Part I: The Strike

When massive television dollars from broadcast giants ABC, CBS, and NBC stopped flowing directly into baseball owners’ pockets 25 years ago, the downturn in revenue helped to cause a strike that the sport took years to recover from. In the earlier part of this decade, a similar specter loomed in the form of a cable bubble, the bursting of which threatened to take away the millions that teams receive to broadcast local games on Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) like the Yankees’ YES Network or the Cardinals’ Fox Sports Midwest. Due to a diversification of revenue, an emphasis on developing streaming technology with a impact felt beyond the sport, and an increasing number of bidders, both traditional and non-traditional, that want to broadcast baseball games, Major League Baseball has been able to avoid a bubble similar to the one that severely damaged the sport 25 years ago. But, as exemplified by the recent Sinclair acquisitions of RSNs and the Blue Jays’ decision to remove Canadian access to their games on MLB.TV, a short-sighted approach could undo their victory in the long-term.

First, how we got here.

In 1988, CBS won the right to broadcast Major League Baseball’s marquee events, including the All-Star Game and World Series, beginning in the 1990 season. The network would spend $1.08 billion over the following four years for those games, reportedly beating the offers of rival networks ABC and NBC by as much as $400 million. While the deal was massive in its size, its importance was outweighed by a smaller but more significant deal signed the same year.

One concern with CBS’ new deal was the dramatic decrease in the number of regular season games broadcast nationally, moving from more than 30 games per season down to just 12 beginning in 1990. Commissioner Peter Ueberoth laughed off those concerns, noting teams’ ability to sell local broadcast rights. Around the same time as the CBS deal, the New York Yankees announced one such deal

A consideration of national TV contracts over the last few decades, or, why we’re stuck with Joe Buck to the end of time…..

Blue Jays games will be blacked out on MLB.TV in Canada

Canadian MLB.TV subscribers received an email yesterday that informed them that Blue Jays games will no longer be able to be streamed live on the league’s streaming service. Those wishing to stream Jays games will now need to subscribe to Sportsnet NOW, a streaming service provided by the broadcasting network that carries Jays games on television.

As Andrew Stoeten wrote in The Athletic, Canadian subscribers were unable to view the Jays live on MLB.TV until the mid 2010’s, when the restriction was lifted. MLB.TV subsequently became a popular purchase for Canadian fans.

Sportsnet is owned by Rogers Media, which also owns the Jays. Clearly this is meant to be a moneymaking opportunity for Rogers, but it’s remarkably shortsighted and petty.

Sportsnet NOW comes at a comparable price to MLB.TV, but it doesn’t carry the whole league. By encouraging fans to subscribe to MLB.TV. you also encourage them to check out baseball as a whole and grow love of the game. And for those fans who are already avid MLB.TV watchers and enjoy the full scope of baseball, they now have to shell out for a second streaming service that isn’t on as many devices as the app they already use.

A consideration of the issue of blackouts- I suppose I am fortunate in that the ones in my neck of the woods are reasonable.

‘Slow Burn’ Creators to Produce Houston Astros Cheating Scandal Podcast, TV Series (Exclusive)

The Houston Astros cheating scandal is getting the podcast and television treatment.

Podcast company Cadence13 is kicking off a new sports documentary podcast franchise with a season that will explore the Astros’ World Series-winning 2017 season. Major League Baseball fined the team in January after a report uncovered that players used technology to communicate signs stolen from opposing teams.

To tell the Astros’ story, Cadence13 has teamed with Sports Illustrated writer Ben Reiter, who will write and host the project, and Slow Burn co-creators Leon Neyfakh and Andrew Parsons, who will produce via Neyfakh’s Prologue Projects shingle. Cadence13 content chief Chris Corcoran and Underground Entertainment partner Steven Fisher will executive produce.

A TV series based on the podcast also is in development with Left/Right Productions, the producer of Epix’s Slow Burn adaptation as well as Showtime’s The Circus and FX’s The Weekly. Reiter, Prologue Projects and Underground also are attached to the adaptation.

We’ve discussed most of the obvious angles with this scandal- why not toss show business into the mix?

‘Jeopardy: Greatest of All Time’ is getting higher ratings than 2019 NBA Finals and World Series

“Jeopardy: Greatest of All Time” has been a total home run with viewers.

The program, a competition between the three most successful winners in “Jeopardy” history, has aired three installments on ABC so far, and is averaging nearly 15 million viewers in same-day ratings. With today’s fractured viewing habits and the decline of traditional network programming, that’s a pretty big deal.

What’s even more impressive is that “Jeopardy: Greatest of All Time” has bested some of network TV’s most stalwart programming: sports. From The Hollywood Reporter”

“Each episode of The Greatest of All Time has also outdrawn the first four games of the 2019 NBA Finals, the first five games of the 2019 World Series, all but one of ESPN’s 17 Monday Night Football telecasts and seven of Fox’s 11 Thursday Night Football showcases.”

So, any theories as for why this is the case, either compared to the World Series specifically or to all of these sports broadcasts generally?

The Pen: MLB owners’ vote could be big news for baseball fans cutting the cord

As part of his opening statement to reporters at Major League Baseball’s owners meetings this week, commissioner Rob Manfred said that teams had “approved unanimously a revised interactive media rights agreement.”

It was a jumbled bit of jargon that was easy to miss between the confirmation that the Kansas City Royals had a new ownership group and the part of the press conference where Manfred evaded questions about the sign-stealing investigation into the Astros organization. This winter is rife already with impactful storylines, existential threats to the game, and even some free-agent signings. It’s easy to ignore a change to the back-end business side of baseball. But this one might have direct implications for fans.

Asked to clarify what exactly the “revised interactive media rights agreement” looks like, Manfred said, “The biggest single change was the return of certain in-market digital rights — the rights that have essentially become substitutional with broadcast rights — those rights will return to the clubs.”

A consideration of potential changes of importance involving how we watch baseball.

Strong ending helps World Series avoid record low viewership

NEW YORK (AP) — It may be no solace to the Houston Astros, but the Washington Nationals’ comeback win in the World Series helped baseball avoid a dubious record.

The series’ seventh and deciding game reached 23.2 million people, eclipsing even “Sunday Night Football” and enabling the Series to average just under 14 million viewers per game, the Nielsen company said. The last game drew nearly 7 million more viewers than any of the other games.

Through five games, the series was on pace to be the least-watched Fall Classic ever.

At least for another year, San Francisco’s four-game sweep of Detroit in 2012 keeps the record of least popular series ever. It averaged 12.66 million viewers.

One last ratings report- as a side note, many of you may find flipping to a few paragraphs ahead rather interesting in terms of understanding the current media market.

Nationals-Astros was least-watched Game 7 this decade, but the ratings news isn’t all bad

These days, when it comes to baseball ratings, you take the good with the bad. For this World Series between the Houston Astros and Washington Nationals, and specifically Wednesday night’s Game 7, there was indeed both good and bad.

John Ourand of Sports Business Journal reports Game 7 had 23.013 million viewers with a 13.1 rating. It was 24 million when you add streaming platforms. That makes it the most-watched non-NFL sporting event of the year on Fox and the most-streamed MLB game ever on Fox.

Those numbers are quite a bit more than the previous games in this series — 85 percent actually, according to Fox Sports’ Michael Mulvihill. The Hollywood Reporter is also calling it the most-watched baseball game in two years.

Where that doesn’t compare as well is to other World Series Game 7s this decade. In fact, it ranks the lowest among the five, coming in below the 2014 Game 7 between the Royals and Giants, which drew 23.517 million viewers. The other end of that is Cubs and Indians in 2016 with 40.047 million.

Nielsen: 2019 World Series on track to be least-watched ever

This year’s Houston Astros-Washington Nationals World Series is on track to be the least-watched in the history of the game, the Associated Press reported via Nielsen data on Tuesday.

The series has averaged 11.6 million viewers through the first five games, according to Nielsen. The current least-watched series was the San Francisco Giants’ sweep of the Detroit Tigers in 2012, which garnered an average of 12.64 million viewers.

An important note, however, is that at least one elimination game — which you might expect to bring higher viewership — is yet to come. Should the Astros clinch it in Game 6, however, it would need to draw approximately 18 million viewers to bring the series’ average over 2012’s average (or average about 15.5 million over the final two games).

[Steps back, waits for the arguments as for why to begin]

Nats’ Game 1 victory drew average of 12.1 million viewers

The World Series opener between the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros narrowly averted setting a record low.

Washington’s 5-4 victory Tuesday night averaged 12,194,000 viewers, according to national numbers from Nielsen. That edges the 12,191,000 who tuned in for San Francisco’s 7-1 win over Kansas City in the 2014 opener.

The numbers are down 11.4% from last year’s Game 1 between the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers, which averaged 13.76 million viewers. The 2017 opener between Houston and LA averaged 14.7 million.

Let the arguments concerning what this means begin!

ESPN may re-work ‘Sunday Night Baseball,’ but A-Rod is safe

The person making this decision needs to be fired and his exact opposite needs to take his place.

Former New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez will be back on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” next season, but the rest of the broadcast team could be different. ESPN is considering making changes in the broadcast booth next season, according to Andrew Marchand of the New York Post.

TNT preempting Star Wars marathon for playoff baseball led to hilarious complaints and “spoilers”

Sports events sometimes run longer than scheduled or wind up on alternate channels, and that can lead to some funny complaints from viewers expecting to see something else. We’ve seen this before with things like college basketball running into golf or college football games being sent to Fox Business Network, but a particularly humorous one happened Monday with TNT. Turner’s plan was to show both National League Division Series games back to back on TBS, with Braves-Cardinals starting at 3 p.m. ET and Dodgers-Nationals beginning at 6:40 p.m. ET. However, Braves-Cardinals ran long, with the Cardinals eventually winning 5-4 in the 10th inning at around 7:15 p.m. Eastern.

You’d think that wouldn’t be a huge problem, as Turner has another high-distribution channel in TNT, and they were able to start Dodgers-Nationals there (including the pre-game show). But that led to a lot of complaints from those who were expecting to watch other programming on TNT at that point; a marathon of the original Star Wars trilogy, including 1977’s A New Hope (on the West Coast feed) and 1983’s Return of the Jedi (on the East Coast Feed). Here are some of those complaints

Bad enough that baseball has been supplanted by football- but being supplanted by a movie series that in forty-plus years has produced maybe one-and-a-half films’ worth of good material?