Baseball games on tv today
Dish Network and their streaming service Sling TV abruptly dropped Fox Sports RSNs last year, right in the middle of baseball season, citing an inability to come to terms with Fox Sports’ new ownership, Sinclair Broadcast Group. Which gets us back to the aforementioned troubling news about streaming. A YouTube TV subscriber living in the Royals’ broadcast area can fire up Fox Sports Kansas City and, because they’re in-market, they won’t be blacked out. Fortunately, RSNs have gradually become available on streaming services, which has been a godsend for people living in these baseball hell zones.
Because they live within the Royals’ territory, they can not watch games on MLB TV either. There are Royals fans who live in the team’s broadcast zone, but whose cable providers do not carry Fox Sports Kansas City and therefore can not watch games that way. y4O7dlJaww- Cody February 19, 2016īut that’s nothing. When ever I get down I just look at blackout map and it makes me laugh. And when I go to his house, where he has a traditional cable package that includes Fox Sports Kansas City, I can watch the Royals broadcast up until the first pitch, at which point the game is blacked out. But when my father-in-law comes over and wants to watch the local team’s games, they are blacked out. For instance, I live outside of the Royals’ territory, so I can view games via MLB TV. This creates some really bizarre scenarios. However, MLB TV subscribers are subject to the exact opposite only out-of-market viewers can stream games because MLB TV is considered a “national broadcast” even though it simply uses the local RSNs’ coverage of the game. Only viewers in the Royals’ territory can watch Royals games on Fox Sports Kansas City, whether that broadcast is delivered through traditional cable/satellite or a streaming service like YouTube TV or Hulu Plus. Today, television broadcasts are carried by regional sports networks (RSNs) on cable, yet the same territories that were created in the antenna era are utilized to determine who can and can’t view these broadcasts.
Baseball games on tv today for free#
Many teams, in an attempt to generate ticket sales, also limited broadcasts to away games and sold out home games under the old assumption that people would stop coming to games if they were available for free on TV. Likewise, no team could broadcast outside of its given territory, so the Yankees, for instance, could not decide that they wanted to tap into the Royals’ fanbase by broadcasting their games in Kansas City. If a local team’s game was broadcast nationally, the local broadcast would air in the team’s territory and the national broadcast would be blacked out. These territories were created in part to protect local stations from the threat of national broadcasts. These territories were created in the radio and over-the-air TV days, and they largely represent areas where a team’s broadcast could be picked up by an antenna – not necessarily where their fanbase resides. Each team has a dedicated geographical area that’s considered its broadcasting territory. But it comes at the same time as some troubling news about streaming options for Royals fans.īefore we get into the details of that troubling news, I want to touch on the current state of baseball broadcasting because it’s kind of messed up. An extra $20-$30 million in revenue can really help out a small market team like the Royals, and in that regard, the new TV deal is a tremendous win for the club. Though it’s not as lucrative as other deals in baseball, the estimated $48-53 million the Royals are rumored to make annually is more than double what they made on their last TV deal. Phys and Hud and the rest of the crew will be back again, thanks to a deal the Royals are making with Sinclair Broadcast Group, who owns the Fox Sports regional networks. It’s hard to know when we’ll have baseball games this year, but whenever the Royals do take the field again, the games will be beamed into to our living rooms on a new TV contract.