5 MLB Sports Networks to Add $19.99 Direct-to-Consumer Streaming
Fans of five baseball teams will be able to designate their pay-TV providers for assignment starting Thursday, when Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Bally Sports regional sports networks(Opens in a new window) start taking signups in those markets for a standalone, $19.99 Bally Sports+ streaming service.
The Sports Business Journal’s(Opens in a new window) John Ourand reported Monday that these Sinclair RSNs–which carry the Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, Miami Marlins, Milwaukee Brewers, and Tampa Bay Rays–will soft launch Thursday at $19.99 a month, with a formal debut coming this fall.
Ourand quoted Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley calling cord-cutting baseball fans “a very under-served, very large portion of the population that would want this product, but can’t get it.”
Cord-cutters haven’t been able to get it because RSNs have been unwilling to untether themselves from their traditional business model of having pay-TV providers include them in large and expensive bundles.
That’s persisted even as steady increases in the rates RSNs charge pay-TV providers for their content have led such streaming-TV services as Google’s YouTube TV to dump these networks(Opens in a new window). Today, the only streaming option for the five Bally Sports RSNs set to add a direct-to-consumer option is DirecTV Stream, on which its $89.99 Choice package adds sports networks.
Earlier this month, New England Sports Network launched NESN 360, a standalone direct-to-consumer service for cord-cutting Boston fans, but its $29.99 monthly rate has not exactly endeared it to the whole of Red Sox Nation. The $19.99 rate for Bally Sports+ may seem more reasonable, although it will still rank well above the $14.99 Canadian rate (about $12 US) for the Toronto
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