https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/202 ... outube-tv/Quote:
Man. It’s, uh, gotta be a pretty un-fun time to be negotiating multi-billion-dollar cable carriage agreements, eh? Don’t turn on CNBC, man.
And that timing could not be worse for the Chicago Cubs, who are trying to get their new Marquee Sports Network carried on Comcast, which covers half the market in Chicago. The problem? Things are so bad for Marquee partner Sinclair that they may be forced to bundle the Chicago-local Comcast negotiations with the much larger negotiations for their full complement of FOX Sports RSNs … and those deals are not up until later in the summer.
Until it became clear in recent weeks just how dire things for Sinclair might be (more on that in a moment), there really wasn’t much concern about the different time tables for the Comcast carriage deals – a Marquee deal could get done before Opening Day, and then Sinclair could separately get its FOX Sports deals done later this year when those deals come up for renewal.
But now that Sinclair might be in a really bad spot on the carriage front? Frankly, I think it’s a lot harder to predict just how Sinclair will proceed.
Indeed, a new report from CableFax speculates that Sinclair may have always intended on bundling all Comcast-RSN negotiations together, which would mean no carriage deal for Marquee until that whole bundle of deals are done. And if those other deals are not up for renewal until, say, August? That would make you very reasonably concerned that the sides couldn’t get a comprehensive carriage agreement finished by March 26, just to accommodate one partner, the Cubs.
That’s especially true at a time when the financial markets are in complete disarray, and things aren’t looking good for Sinclair overall – which could make Comcast squeeze even harder.
We should talk about something we haven’t discussed much, within the context of Marquee: Sinclair, who is handling carriage negotiations, is having a brutal year.
Ever since Sinclair thrust itself aggressively in the RSN space last year, their stock price has been absolutely crushed by investors that presumably do not believe Sinclair can make work their vision of leveraging all these RSNs together for even better carriage deals. DISH temporarily exiting the RSN space in July seems to have been perceived as a particularly bad sign by the market.
Notably, those negotiations happened while Disney still owned the FOX RSNs, and the DISH chairman recently suggested things might have gone differently if Sinclair had been in charge at the time. Bad timing for Sinclair, I guess, but nothing since has led investors to have more faith.
Sinclair is down nearly 70% since May of last year, when they originally agreed to purchase the FOX RSNs:
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
