Red Sox Regional Sports Network Launches $30 Streaming Service
The Boston Red Sox may be dwelling near the cellar(Opens in a new window) of the American League East, but the regional sports network that carries the team’s games now stands ahead of other baseball “RSNs” in giving cord cutters an alternative to the pay-TV bundle.
On Wednesday, New England Sports Network announced(Opens in a new window) NESN 360(Opens in a new window), a direct-to-consumer streaming service that viewers in its broadcast territory can get for $29.99 a month instead of having to subscribe to a pay-TV provider’s bigger and pricier bundle of channels to watch Red Sox and Boston Bruins games.
(The two teams co-own this Watertown, Mass.-based sports network, which is available(Opens in a new window) throughout New England except for Fairfield County, Conn.)
Offering a standalone subscription at any price is unprecedented in the RSN business, even as many streaming services have dropped these channels because of their high price—Google’s YouTube TV, for example, dumped NESN in 2020(Opens in a new window).
Prior to Wednesday’s announcement, Sox fans who had fired their cable, fiber-optic, or satellite pay-TV provider only had two streaming options: fuboTV and its $69.99 Pro(Opens in a new window) bundle or DirecTV Stream and its $89.99 Choice package(Opens in a new window).
Major League Baseball’s own MLB.tv, meanwhile, doesn’t work for local fans because of the regional blackouts it enforces(Opens in a new window) to protect the RSN business. That’s left cord-cutting fans who are done with TV bundles stuck watching the occasional game featured on an over-the-top service like Peacock or Apple TV+, trying to work around MLB.tv blackouts with VPNs, viewing at sports bars or friends’ houses, “watching” via the
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