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Yeah, there's a lot about this launch that seems half-cocked to me.
For instance, the Milwaukee media market has, at long last, been added to the Blackhawks' territory. That's good, because the whole reason we don't have Milwaukee in the league is because Bill Wirtz claimed it was his and did fuck-all with it. However, once you're part of the territory, you can't get that team via the out-of-market package, but there's not to my knowledge a channel in Milwaukee that has agreed to carry the Chicago Sports Network, and I don't know why they would, because the Bulls and White Sox would be blacked out in Milwaukee. (The Cubs and Sox are allowed Kenosha but it gets spotty from there.) Thus, Hawks fans in southeastern Wisconsin are in a donut hole whereby they cannot subscribe to watch their team nor can they watch them locally for free or on cable. This is the same dilemma MLB has where six teams have claimed the entire state of Iowa (Royals, Cardinals, Twins, Brewers, Cubs, White Sox), requiring cable providers to carry six different RSNs, one of which, Kansas City, I don't believe is even offered to headends east of Des Moines. This was a "somebody's gotta do something about this problem" like 20 years ago and we've not only not made progress but are moving backward.
There's also the fact that the DTC offerings are limited or nonexistent even in Chicago. The Dallas Stars have gone entirely online (appropriate for their Extremely Online fanbase) and aren't even putting their games over the air--you watch on the app and that's it. I have serious reservations about that model, too, but the Hawks/Bulls/Sox are at the other extreme. If the whole idea here is that people don't watch television they way they used to anymore, then you have to meet people where they are with more versatile offerings than linear, rabbit-ears TV. Even for cable subscribers, I think there's a baseline expectation to be able to pause, rewind, fast-forward, and record live sports. That does not exist via antenna. That's the real move backward.
The only explanation I have for why they're doing this now while cable RSNs are still alive and well in the Northeast is that they have access to numbers that we don't and that the numbers show that Chicago, always a latecomer to cable, is really checked out on it, and that further paywalling their games on linear cable has become even more of a liability than anyone could imagine, and that they had to pull the trigger now and get their shit together later if they wanted anyone to see any of their product.
HOWEVER, the record for regional sports networks botching the launch is really, really not good. The Twins tried to get out from under Fox Sports and do their own channel. Failed miserably, ran back in a matter of months. The Royals tried to start their own channel. No one carried it, no one watched, they went back to Fox, too. The Charlotte Bobcats started a channel, no one carried it, failed in a year. CSN Houston was a complete disaster and went bankrupt. I think the pandemic saved Marquee, because if you remember, Comcast wouldn't pick them up throughout spring training, and if the season had started on time with no carriage, it would have been all but dead on arrival.
_________________ Molly Lambert wrote: The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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