NHL is a straight 50-50 split between players and ownership, not sure what the NBA's is but I think it favors the players. NFL's might favor the owners like 51-49. (EDIT: pretty much yeah.) I know the NHL has had a year or two recently with a sizable clawback from escrow, though.

MLB is the one league where salaries aren't pegged to league revenues. You gotta believe that's about to be the big enchilada for the owners. Keep an eye on that.

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The owners would have to open their books to make that happen. They've shown zero appetite for doing that in the past. We'll see.

Yeah, that and they would inevitably have to lock out the players, and there's no appetite for a work stoppage, either. But if the entire cable-subscribing public is no longer involuntarily giving you money, and that cable-subscribing public has significantly diminished, that might be what it takes to start the "cost-certainty" conversation.

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Is it more profitable for teams to put the games on locally over free digital TV and sell local ads?

They are finding out that the general public will quickly remove sports themed station if given an ala carte option and would much rather pay for Netflix than give ESPN or RSN's 5-10 bucks a month.

Does seem you need a massive dedicated fan base to make a team specific network work, Yankees and Dodgers can pull it off, but the rest of the league cannot, so you really are entering a time where the big market franchises will have even more enhanced revenue streams.

Read that the Hawks are actually feeling the lack of local revenue they were getting from the NBC Sports Chicago (RIP) local broadcast, so the Hawks must be feeling the financial impact of nearly five years of bottom dwelling. Apparently if you put out a terrible product nobody really cares if your games are available on TV locally, Danny Wirtz is doing a fantastic job of protecting season reservation holders, Bill Wirtz would be proud.

Since Bally Sports Soutwest went belly-up, Dallas Stars trying a streaming service, integrates with smart tv's, phones, whatever. It's free if you live in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas or if you have a VPN, all the VPN providers have Dallas hubs. Stars still considering broadcasting free OTA as well.

Trailblazers trying a combination of team-owned streaming service and local, free OTA broadcasts this season.

Jazz and Suns both moved to free OTA broadcasts and saw their viewer count go up 50%+ per game


Blackhawks should try what the Wings did: first season Red Wings missed the playoffs in 25 years they opened a brand new arena; kept the Wings top 5 in attendance for a few more seasons, til the pandemic.

Streaming services are fine, but for sports, their quality has yet to match OTA. I really wish we would get to the point where the big contracts are all dead and the blackouts are gone. I'd be more than fine paying a yearly subscription directly to the league per sport or per team.

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Bibgo. Amazon is the biggest content-delivery company in the world and I still get buffering and downsampling during Thursday night games. (Thankfully, I'm not missing much.) This is even with the TV hardwired to the modem; I imagine if I tried to watch over wi-fi it'd be worse. Even if all these rinky-dink TeamName+ services all just use Amazon infrastructure anyway, there's still a quality gap between cable and live streaming.


Convenient, but very, very bad for sports and their place in the monoculture.

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Reading tons of ongoing negative social media posts about the Hawks games being unavailable, odd that there is always a poster that defends the team and tells people where to get digital TV antennas, almost as if the team has social media interns watching sites.

There are more and more posts getting tons of likes thanking the team for not making the teams broadcasts available because the posters do not have to watch piss poor Hawks hockey. Making a bad product hard to find is not working out and the team is becoming a joke to fans that would normally consume the product, they have to stop the bleeding at some point.

It was on ESPN+ last night. There was a note during the dame that the channel was available on Directv and RCN.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

I watched some of the hawks last night over the air. Even to my old and bad eyes the difference was quite noticeable. I may have to do the same with the Bears game on Sunday.

As for Amazon, the quality of TNF seems to still be far behind youtube TV sports I cannot understand why. Movies and TV shows on Prime seem fine.

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"I honestly don't see a good bet on the board here."

I've had an antenna mounted on my roof since I cut the cord in 2010. The game came in clear as a bell.

Well, yeah, an actual aerial antenna is going to have better reception than what most people are hustling to buy for like $20. Also, how far from the Sears Tower are you? Looks like a retard and I are about 22 miles as the crow flies.

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I'm about 15 miles. In this age of cord cutting, the aerial is worth the investment.

How many channels do you get with your antenna?

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Hawaii (fuck) You

I've noticed Mt. Prospect has a lot more rooftop antennas than average. I can't tell whether they're all very sophisticated cord-cutters or just never took them down in 1989. Both are equally likely.

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For fucks sake...had this board been around circa 1971, this would've been THE SAME DISCUSSION...

"yeah i got an antenna..but i still don't get channel 2..well put it in yer attic...ok..."


FFS...not having the ability to pause, rewind in this day age is ridiculous

I was thinking the same thing. We are talking about antenna's in a world where I can watch anything on my phone.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Making your product less accessible seems foolish.

Seems to be a great business opportunity here, digital antenna hats that you can hook up to your phone, new tin foil at brigade!

A few of the hardcore Hawks fans might actually go for that, but the casual fan is not gonna go out and buy an antenna to watch bad Hawks/Sox/Bulls games.

As I mentioned in another thread, Laurence hinted that NBC shut the channel down out from under the teams and left them scurrying to cobble this network together in six months' time, but didn't see fit to go into further detail on this, the biggest non-Bears story in Chicago sports right now.

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And through all of this, the long-time employees of NBCSports Chicago were faced with an ultimatum:Stay with NBSC through the end of Sept. (thus missing out on any opportunity to land with the new CHSC) to keep your severance package intact.

Well respected Blackhawks television Director Dave Turner is no longer directing after probably close to 3 decades in that role

Channel 2 actually works now for OTA

I do agree that pausing and rewinding is missed, but as mentioned earlier....streaming quality just is not there for live sports. This is the antenna I have in my attic...doesn't even need to be n the roof. Works great.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MY ... =UTF8&th=1

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Hawks are still getting torched on social media for not getting the deal done with Comcast, and the team should be happy people still care enough to post, they will eventually get to a point where people give up and do not care, and NHL teams do not have the huge league TV deals that can carry the Sox and Bulls.

Laurence is now OUT THERE, reporting. On...X

"Feel different in a good way"? It's a streaming platform, not a buttplug.

But yeah, this is a classic freemium model. The games are free, if you're willing to not have DVR capabilities, buy another piece of hardware, and live somewhere with good enough over-the-air reception to pick up the weakest signal in the market. Or, if you want to time-shift and guarantee that you can actually see and hear the game (we hope), you can pay $25 a month. It's like the Mormon conception of Heaven, where everyone is entitled to the "really great" tier but people with annual subscriptions qualify for "really really really great."

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If and when the app gets going, I have to assume they pull the plug on the OTA component. Most people will probably prefer the app, but there's still a percentage of us that won't pay for what we can get for free.

They would have to pay people way more than $19.99 per month to watch the Sox.

Yup. I'd sure like to see some raw numbers on the 2024 White Sox TV numbers. I can't imagine they getting more than a couple thousand watching a night.

I wouldn’t pay $20 for season tickets right now.

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Sox might have to go to a "pay you to view" model where they give you the app for free and send you $5-$10 bucks per game so you will watch.

Similar to completing on-line certifications, they will have to find a way to make you interact with the app during the game so people just don't set it and forget it. Maybe there will be quizzes on what happened in the previous inning? Or they will have some on line version of #soxmath?

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"I honestly don't see a good bet on the board here."