Cubs, Sinclair, Marquee, and Comcast Combine Forces for a Potential Blackout for Cubs’ Fans
In many cases, no news is good news. But for the Cubs, their broadcasting partner Sinclair, and the new Marquee Network, no news is bad news. While there’s still more than a month to go before the network is on the air, it has yet to reach agreements with Comcast/Xfinity, the largest cable provider in Chicago, as well as RCN and streaming only services like Hulu Live, Sling, and Youtube TV. In his piece for the Chicago Tribune, Phil Rosenthal provides a reminder of where things stand for viewers in Chicago when it comes to seeing Cubs’ games this season:
While Marquee currently has deals in place to run on a handful of carriers, including DirecTV, U-verse, AT&T TV, Charter Communications and Mediacom Communications, it is lost on no one that it’s still negotiating with many others, including Comcast’s Xfinity, the Chicago-area’s largest carrier with an estimated 1.5 million households.
As Rosenthal notes, Sinclair was able to leverage its massive reach across the country, which includes local stations and more than half the Regional Sports Networks that air baseball games, to secure deals with AT&T/DirecTV/Uverse/DirecTVNow, allowing the Cubs and Sinclair to say they reach nearly all Chicagoland homes. But reaching nearly every home and actually airing in those homes are two entirely different things. The deals with Charter and Mediacom aren’t insignificant, as fans in downstate Illinois, southern Wisconsin, Iowa, and Indiana will likely have access to Cubs games in the spring with a cable package. The Cubs didn’t start their own network to reap the benefits of subscriber fees in those areas, however, as getting on cable in homes in Chicago is the big prize and moneymaker.
In Rosenthal’s piece, he notes that the Yankees’ YES network had difficulties getting onto Comcast a few years back. The Yankees’ situation provides an interesting analogue both for its similarities and its differences. While Comcast was in nearly a million homes at the time, none of them were in New York City, where YES Network was available to millions more subscribers. Comcast was a smaller fish for YES, unlike the situation in Chicago. In addition, the dispute ended when Comcast wanted to add Fox News Channel to its lineup and FOX, which owned YES at the time, was able to leverage those negotiations into carriage for YES on Comcast. It’s not clear that the Cubs and Sinclair have the same type of leverage in Chicago.
Sinclair used its array of stations to get on AT&T’s (and their related brands’) channel list, but Chicago and Comcast could be a bit more difficult. Sinclair doesn’t own any stations in Chicago and doesn’t have any other bundling leverage in the area. Sinclair could try to go nationally with Comcast, like it did with AT&T, but Comcast’s strongest markets — like Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and San Francisco — also represent limited Sinclair coverage and no Sinclair-owned RSNs. That leaves the negotiating battle down to how important it is to Comcast’s business in Chicago to air Cubs’ games, and that leaves an odd competitive situation.
The Chicago market can certainly support more than one RSN, given that Comcast used to air Cubs, White Sox, Bulls, and Blackhawks games, but the clubs had to negotiate outside deals with WGN, ABC, and others to ensure that all their games were on television. One channel wasn’t enough to support all those teams. The Cubs opted to leave the other clubs behind and start their own network and among their available options, chose to partner with Sinclair. With the White Sox and Bulls sharing an owner, and the Bulls and Blackhawks sharing a stadium, there’s a significant overlap in interests among the three clubs. There’s also an overlap with Comcast, who has partnered with those teams to continue NBC Sports Chicago after the Cubs went their own way.
Promoting the White Sox likely isn’t Comcast’s primary concern when it comes to negotiating with the Marquee network; putting an exciting, active White Sox team ahead of the Cubs, when the former is on a station already on Comcast’s channel lists and partially owned by Comcast, could be a minor thought in negotiations. Indeed, Comcast’s main priority isn’t the Cubs or White Sox — for the latter, NBC Sports Chicago isn’t currently on Dish or Sling due to a fight of their own. Rather, subscribers (and how much they pay) are most important. The cable company will need to decide whether a potential loss of subscribers due to not airing the Cubs compares to the cost of putting the Marquee network on the air, or the potential loss of subscribers overall due to raising prices associated with their own higher costs.
We don’t know exactly how Comcast will make those decisions, but we do know that if they take the same path AT&T did in Los Angeles, baseball fans are going to be the ones to suffer. The market for RSNs in Los Angeles was more saturated than the one in Chicago, and the Cubs are arguably more popular in Chicago than the Dodgers are in Los Angeles, though getting a read based on that popularity based on television ratings presents a circular impossibility given that the Dodgers aren’t in half the homes in their market.
Right now, there’s not much forcing Comcast into a deal. Cubs games haven’t yet been played and the network hasn’t even debuted. In addition, while AT&T/DirecTV does present a viable competitor for switching services, without deals with RCN or most of the streaming-only services, there aren’t a ton of alternatives for Cubs’ fans. It could be argued that pieces like the one in the Tribune or this one serve the interests of the Cubs and Sinclair. The Marquee network wants fans to know they don’t have a deal with Comcast in the hopes that fans will call the company and demand the channel. They aren’t going to actively tell people to switch to AT&T while there are still hopes of a deal with Comcast, but making fans aware of the potential impasse is the first step to inspiring action in potential customers.
Two massive media companies are currently playing a game of chicken and Cubs fans are currently sitting in the backseat with no control over the drivers. Negotiations like this are common in the television industry, though Sinclair has a fairly ugly history of blackouts that were cause for concern more than a year ago when they were first rumored as a potential partner with the Cubs. Those concerns have yet to come to fruition with the launch of the network still a month away, but Sinclair’s past history still argues for caution.
Since winning the World Series, the Cubs haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory on or off the field. The team is no longer starting a network on the heels of a dynasty, but on a team that hasn’t won a playoff game since 2017 and missed the postseason entirely last year. The club looks to be completely ignoring their window for contention, and most attention to the team has surrounded trading their best player and former MVP, Kris Bryant. The Cubs should still be good next season, but they aren’t acting like a team trying to win over fans, and their new Marquee network might be marching in lockstep with the club alienating a certain portion of the fanbase for the sake of higher profits.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
As a Cubs fan, this whole situation is actually kinda great for me.
The Ricketts family is full of awful people. They’re more concerned with making money than winning games. And they’ve partnered with an evil right-wing authoritarian-enabling company to air their games.
But instead of me having to feel guilty about supporting them by watching Cubs games, I can blissfully say “oh well, can’t get that station here anyways” and go on about my day. The universe is working itself out.
Agree 100%. Never been a better time to follow the White Sox.
Yeah, this is spot on. Partner with Sinclair?! GTFO.
And it just so happens the cross town team is young, looks exciting, and could be a serious contender as soon as this coming year.
Yeah they’re terrible. They spent $1 Billion to acquire a last place team that couldn’t even make it to the World Series with one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, sunk another $1 billion into the surrounding community and added increased police protection, LGBTQ events, and brought in the best GM (at that time) and manager on the market that resulted in a world series while also upgrading the Latin facilities and community/educational programs that have become world class.
They even brought a World Series to North Side for the first time in 108 years.
Bastards.
That’s so incorrect its scary. The Ricketts family took over a team that has never fell outside the top 5 in team revenues (according to Forbes). They bought it for $900M, a price that included Wrigley Field, 25% of Comcast Chicago, and various other holdings. They then pretended to be unable to pay for the team for four years in order to get concessions from the City of Chicago. They threatened to move from Wrigley to the suburbs so that the City would permit them to change zoning laws to turn Wrigleyville from a neighborhood into an entertainment complex. Really though, they were tanking. Tanking isn’t such a bad strategy, but for FOUR years with a top 5 revenue team? They’ve since radically increased their revenues and own half of the area surrounding Wrigley Field. I guess you’re calling that the billion dollars into the surrounding community, but really is the building of larger roads, parking garages, bars, and hotels that the City never permitted for previous owners because the City used to be committed to keeping a neighborhood surrounding Wrigley Field (PS. do you really think that the Ricketts’ pay for police protection???). The Ricketts family finally brought a championship to the north side and they are to be commended for doing so, but they’ve also lined their pockets heavily and continue to do so. They are going to try to stay below the luxury tax line this season and there’s nothing wrong with that. But… that’s a bad look for a team breaking out a new network and attempting to trade its best player.
And they did this all out of their kindness of their heart, and their love and affinity for Chicago and the neighborhood, right? RiGhT!?!
Save me this nonsense. The Ricketts have scammed and conned their way out of tax obligations that would be very beneficial to the city and their “investments” into the neighborhood are driven solely by revenue increases for the organization. After they got the approval, and have built up the area bringing in record revenues, they now cry poor and are claiming/pushing for trading their best player instead of attempting to re-sign him because they can’t “afford” it. Meanwhile, they’re starting their own TV network to increase revenues by even more, but they can’t actually reinvest that into the team… and heaven forbid they spend over the luxury tax after having 4 years, mid-rebuild, in which they spent no money and made a boat load. This all without even bringing up the scummy nature of the tribune sale.
Hey, CubbieBlue66. DJT is president. Get used to it, already. Its going to be another 4 years, too. Who knew so many weirdo pseudo political junkies read fangraphs? Stop with the incessant political slanted articles and posts on this site. Its for baseball. Not weirdo politics, left or right.
Yeah, ‘stick to baseball,’ right? GTFO.
Yet strangely they have contended for the post season 5 years in a row. There is no such thing for them as caring more about making money than winning because making big money is directly tied to winning. They are highly motivated to win, especially with the new TV network because TV ratings always go up and down if your are winning or losing.
They will again have one of the highest payrolls in MLB, but you act as though it is chump change. You call them awful people but they have made things better for Cubs fans than any previous owner did.
If you don’t get the Marquee games it will be because you chose not to, not because they were not available.
Cubs kinda screwing up the offseason…
Even as a Cubs fan, I gotta say their fall from 2016 is very Cubslike.
Back in my day the only team that was on the teevee at all was the damn Cubs, now they might not be on it at all anymore?!?!?!
The Cubs national fanbase was built off of being available on WGN back when superstations were a thing. It also happened at a time when the White Sox were early adopters of pay TV services (OnTV) so they were less visible. The Cubs also sold sunshine in the bleachers and being lovable losers but the TV exposure outside of Chicago was what made it all work.
I think the model has moved past the point where this would ruin them, but it would be somewhat ironic if they went this route now.
Well, the Cubs on WGN, as well as the Braves on TBS.
How viable are these options for fans until the Sinclair-Comcast negotiation gets resolved?
–Subscribe to a live TV streaming service like Sling TV Blue, Fubo TV or YouTube TV (starting at $25 a month)
–Subscribe to MLB.TV (reduced to $27 for the rest of the season)
It’s annoying to pay $25+/month more than one originally expected, but that’s still cheaper than almost any seat at Wrigley for any single game.
With all networks bargaining with carriers like this, it seems the big bundle may need to be split up into smaller bundles for Sports Fans, Parents/Kids Networks, News Junkies, etc. Else, they’ll suffer more erosion to OTT choices like NetFlix, Amazon, Apple, Disney.
I’m wondering: Where do the revenues to those go? My guess is that they would go to the league, not the Cubs, which would be…interesting.
None of the live TV services have carriage deals worked out with the Cubs either, so unless they do in the future, that plan won’t work.
MLB.TV will work great if you’re outside the Cubs’ viewing area, but if you’re not, their games will be blacked out, so that plan won’t work either. Yes, you can find ways around the blackout rules, it’s not so difficult that the average Fangraphs reader couldn’t do it, but most TV subscribers are lower-tech than us and won’t be able to.
What you’re proposing about breaking up the bundle (going to “a-la-carte” or a “skinny bundle”) has already been tried over the last few years and is largely unsuccessful. What if Dad’s a sports fan but the kids want their channels too? Now you’re paying more than you were for the big bundle.
Subscriber loss is going to continue no matter what, and Comcast and the like are probably trying not to get caught in lengthy and expensive carriage agreements. it sucks as a fan, but what corporation cares about the fan? There will be no easy and affordable solution that benefits the consumer.
Thanks! Great information on the non-viability of the “skinny bundle” and on negotiations ongoing in the Denver market that you provided below. Businesses care about their customers — I think they’re finding out that they’ve left a lot of money on the table and TV viewers are willing to pay a lot more than we’ve been paying. Certainly, vis a vis the costs of attending a game in person.
That’s not true. They do have and agreement with AT&T and will have contracts with others. It will be easy for comcast customers to keep their internet and drop their TV service if Comcast decides not to carry it… but the chances that Comcast won’t carry is small.
Exactly.
This seems like a great time to illegally stream content
Probably the most direct parallel at the moment is the situation with Altitude Sports in Denver, which carries the Avalanche (NHL) and Nuggets (NBA). Denver is nowhere near the market that Chicago is and neither team is a marquee franchise like the Cubs, but because Altitude is an independent RSN with no leverage, Comcast has dug in. Comcast is the only cable operator in the Denver metro area, and are insisting Altitude take dramatically less money for carriage than it got on its previous deal. The result? Halfway through the season (with the most promising rosters for both clubs in years), there is no way for fans to watch at home to watch the games, unless they switch to DirecTV or find illegal workarounds.
From a broader perspective, Comcast seems to be placing its bets that local sports aren’t important to its business model. They make their cash on internet service, and are soon to release Peacock as their direct-to-consumer streaming service. They’d rather stick to distributing RSNs that they own themselves or ones with either smaller carriage fees or larger overall deals. No idea if the strategy will work but with subscriber losses either way, it seems to be the risk they’re willing to take.
Local sports aren’t important to *their* business model.
ISPs in this country are essentially a cartel. They intentionally don’t infringe on each other’s territories. They’ve effectively eliminated healthy supply and demand in major markets across the country (try shopping around for the best cable and internet if you live in NYC) meaning that they get to set their own prices unchecked and treat their customers like garbage.
They’ve done the math. They’ll only pay the RSNs x and risk losing y% of their cable subscribers as a result, but they know they’re not going to lose internet subscriptions because there aren’t any alternatives for consumers in their areas, so the risk is mitigated in a huge way. People can live without cable. They absolutely cannot love without the internet.
Googling “chicago broadband providers” returns “Top 29 Internet Providers” including AT&T, Xfinity, Spectrum, RCN, Viasat, HughesNet, WOW!, Atlantic Broadband.
This doesn’t even count using your Cellular Service Provider to turn your phone into a mobile hotspot, nor does it count Google FI.
“ISPs in this country are essentially a cartel” is total nonsense.
There are a few issues with this:
a) The original comment referenced Houston, and I referenced NYC, cities wherein competition is non-existent. Not as familiar with Chicago specifically, but..
b) Just because there are 29 results in your search does not mean that all of those are available universally to all consumers across the city of Chicago. In NYC, for example, in the vast majority of apartment buildings, you are only given one option for your subscription.
c) After AT&T, Xfinity and Spectrum, I’ve never even heard of those other providers. Based on my local research, the smaller, start up companies are either vastly over-priced, offer below average service, or in most cases, both.
d) And this is the biggest one, this does nothing to dispute why the major companies (Comcast, Verizon, Optimum, etc.) actively do not infringe on each other’s territories in major markets. Your list for Chicago, for example, only includes one of the Top 6 in the country (AT&T).
Regardless, the reason is clear, and it’s simple economics. They are working in concert to limit supply and drive up the price for demand.
I’m not one for “big government” but frankly what they are doing is criminal and deserves greater regulation given how reliant our country and the world have become on the internet.
Also consider the fact that there was legislation on the table that would allow the ISPs to impact your service based on what you were streaming. Meaning that if you decided to drop your cable subscription, but keep internet for streaming, they could reduce your bandwidth to whatever to try and steer you back toward the programming they want you to consume. Fortunately this was not allowed, but the fact that it got as close as it did is alarming.
It’s disgusting.
They are not working in concert. More and more technologies are adding to the competition.
Maybe he means cable providers but certainly every urban market has lots of ISP choices. The number of ISPs is growing all the time with starlink satellite broadband coming online in 2020.
Meh, the Doyers were able to work it out. Have the Astros?
The Astros sold their rights to the highest bidder and lost control of the distribution process. The Cubs own their their own network and can negotiate with the cable companies on price.
To correct an error in the article, NBC Sports NETWORK is available on Dish/Sling; it is NBC Sports CHICAGO that was pulled from Dish/Sling in October. Easy mistake to make.
I wonder if the Cubs (and others) have any intention of making their own subscription streaming app now that the commissioner has said local streaming rights have reverted to the individual clubs.
That’s what i meant. Fixed. Thank you.
This is almost 2 decades after the YES networked launch. Connected device/Smart TV’s already reach over 85% of TV Households. Sinclair brought in partnerships with Amazon, Google and Roku in their other collaborations and I’m assuming this would be no different.
Comcast doesn’t have quite the same leverage they did in 2003, and media habits have dramatically changed even since the Dodger fiasco in 2013.
Also – Comcast in now a direct competitor for Chicago sports programming which raises a possible must carry legal initiative available that overlaps the Comcast footprint.
These guys aren’t stupid. They’ve already got this mapped out. Even with a slight hiccup if it goes to court – this isn’t nearly as dire as portrayed here.
I probably should have been more clear about what in the article I linked to, but the YES situation is only a few years old.
The thing that should really worry Cubs fans who want to see their team on TV is not that this is “two massive media companies…….currently playing a game of chicken” but, instead, two potential bargaining partners whose Venn diagrams simply don’t intersect. It is entirely conceivable that there is only a way for one company, or the other, to make money, but not both.
Yeah, these things suck. I had to settle for the radio (and a couple of free YouTube broadcasts) to listen to Cardinals games last September while Fox Sports Midwest and Dish Network were duking it out. Thankfully, the playoff games were still watchable.
One of the Cubs strengths used to be their broad reach giving them a large fanbase outside Chicago. WGN’s powerful radio broadcast could be tuned in for hundreds of miles. WGN TV was a superstation broadcast nationally. Thus, you’d find Cubs fans across the midwest, and in many distant markets that didn’t have their own team. Based on their media dealings of the past 15 years, the Cubs have apparently decided that having fewer fans is better.
Not true. The superstation decided to get out of local sports and MLB no longer allows teams to have national TV contracts.
I’m surprised MLB.tv hasn’t figured out a price point for an option to avoid local blackouts. Yes they don’t want to eat into the TV deals, and it wouldn’t be for the very casual fan, but surely there’s a market for a certain fan for this
I’d pay for this.
Legit question: does the MLB app or some other service prevent teams from creating their own DTC app? I know baseball’s broadcast rights are archaic bullshit, just wondering if anyone had a better understanding.
Claiming that no news is bad news is the worst kind of journalism. Unless it becomes bad news, no news is simply no news… but why not stir up the fans when you get a chance.
You also mislead the readers comparing the Marquee situation to the Dodgers situation when there is no comparison.
The Dodgers did not start their own network. They sold rights to the highest bidder, but the bidder bid so high that their asking price to cable companies was too high for those cable companies.
In this case, the Cubs own the network along with a minority distribution and production partner.
From all indications they are still negotiating with many outlets to carry the games and may even have a streaming option for those in the market who can’t get the game elsewhere.
Since the Cubs own the channel and only make money by getting subscribers and selling ads, they are highly motivated to reach the maximum amount of customers, because viewers drive ratings, which brings in money.
You fail to point out, that while not every outlet has said yes to carrying Marquee… to date… no one has said no. That means negotiations continue.
In the Dodgers situation, many immediately said no because the rights holder did not have the option of lowering the price without losing money.
The Cubs have the option of hitting just the right price to get on cable companies because they own the channel.
They are not telling the customers to pressure the cable companies because they know that if the spring training games start and Comcast is not yet on board… Comcast will feel the pressure of losing customers. In these days of cord cutting, cable TV customers can simply keep their internet and cut their TV service and add a streaming option that carries Marquee.
Comcast simply can’t afford to lose many more customers than they are already losing each year.
As far as the Sinclair partnership, ever Cubs fan already watched some Sinclair stations. The entire Fox Sports regional networks are owned by Sinclair and Sinclair has contracts with many pro sports teams.
Sinclair is a minority partner in Marquee, with no control over editorial content. The Cubs had no experience is running a network or distributing the games, so they needed a partner with experience in those areas to get the job done… but the Cubs are in charge of the network, not Sinclair.
The headline is one of the worst clickbait titles ever. It implies that they are all conspiring together against the fans.
By the way, partnering with Sinclair was also about the negotiating clout that they have. They own a number of local affiliate TV stations in the Cubs TV market which cable companies want to carry. They also own the Tennis Channel and all of the Foxs Sports RSNs in other markets.