
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19753058/YES_YouTubeTV.png)
Of course, circumstances have changed somewhat.
MARQUEE NETWORK YOUTUBE TV TV
If YouTube TV wanted to carry Marquee, the odds are good that it would have agreed to do so in the negotiations last March. The exceptions: The Yes Network, Fox Sports West, Prime Ticket, and, yes, the Marquee Sports Network. After a few days of name-calling, the companies finally settled the dispute with YouTube TV agreeing to carry 19 of the 23 regional sports networks owned or partly-owned by Sinclair. YouTube TV last March engaged in a fee fight with Sinclair Broadcasting, which is a co-owner of the Marquee Sports Network with the Cubs. (The 2020 MLB season will begin on July 23 with two games while the rest of the league will start play on July 24.) I don’t expect it will, either, at least not before next week’s Opening Day. YouTube TV does not carry the Marquee Sports Network, the new TV home of the Chicago Cubs. In other words, the problem might be not that cord cutting is eating into the existing TV business model, but that it hasn’t devoured enough of it yet to force the parties involved into their own equivalent of a rebuilding year.Bobby, as you note, YouTube TV just raised the price of its monthly service from $50 to $65, a 30 percent increase. Parker voiced a similar concern, saying “they have to get the fans onboard and keep them on all year, and I’m not convinced they can.” Nathanson noted an upfront risk of that for RSNs: “it would give all distributors a reason to drop these networks for good from their lineups.” Just not this year, he added: “There’s nothing I believe that is gonna be available for this season in that vein, just because it takes time to kind of stand some of those things up.” “What we’re trying to do is create ways for direct offerings in those markets,” he said. There, MLB chief operations and strategy officer Chris Marinak answered a question about declining streaming availability of games by saying baseball is coaxing teams to add a direct-to-consumer approach.

Major League Baseball would like more of that, to judge from a March 17 online media preview of the 2021 season. Nathanson noted that AT&T’s pending spinoff of its video services into a new company partially owned by the private-equity firm TPG could lead to tighter budgets there.īut only one team offers local fans a direct-to-fans service: The Toronto Blue Jays’ SportsNet Now sells standalone subscriptions to Canadian fans. “Every lost OTT partner is a reduction in the RSNs’ distribution footprint that might not be easily replaced,” emailed GlobalData senior analyst Tammy Parker. Sports networks could use new OTT options too.

Many cord-cutting baseball fans might prefer to pay directly to watch their team’s games instead of worrying which service will add or drop that feed next. Tech-savvy types have spent years signing up for Major League Baseball’s MLB.tv (which T-Mobile subscribers once again get free) and then evading its blackouts of local teams (“local” can mean hundreds of miles from the ballpark in question) using virtual-private-network apps or such location-proxy services as .Īnd at some point this season, the continued march of coronavirus vaccinations should permit many fans to return safely to ballparks.
MARQUEE NETWORK YOUTUBE TV FOR FREE
YouTube will stream 21 games for free without regional blackouts, ESPN subscribers can watch Sunday-night games, and some teams continue to air games on local broadcast TV. Yankees fans who don’t want to ante up for AT&T TV but do subscribe to Amazon Prime AMZN will get 21 games this season on that service. But none of them are as simple as signing up for an “over the top” video app and handing over a credit card to that OTT service. Viewers who don’t want to pay AT&T’s elevated price-to be fair, that $85 rate still beats cable or satellite TV costs after you add in their unadvertised add-on fees that escalate every year-aren’t out of options.
