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Sports blackouts are the worst. This we know.
There isn’t much worse than sitting down to watch your local team compete only to find out that the only teams you can actually watch are those outside of your market area.
Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, for one, knows it is a scourge on sports and has vowed to do something about it. No one is holding their breath waiting for the change, however.
So one Congressman, Pat Ryan of New York, is taking on the mantle and demanding an investigation into American consumers being cheated out of “thousands of dollars” by sports blackouts.
“Yesterday was the sports equinox, the one day of the year that all four major professional sports leagues play at once,” Ryan told Fox News on Tuesday.
“Yet New Yorkers, who already pay thousands of dollars a year to watch their favorite teams, stared at black screens because billionaire owners care more about profit than their fans. It’s bull s—.”
“You shouldn’t have to buy six streaming services just to find out the game is blacked out. The leagues make more than enough money. Let’s put power back where it belongs: with the fans.”
Ryan has even written a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) about his and others frustration with sports blackouts.
“As a result of policies adopted by major sports leagues and broadcasters, fans in their home team’s territory are blocked from viewing nearly all of their team’s games on any platform other than their local regional sports network (RSN), forcing them to subscribe to the RSN while out-of-market viewers have their pick of cheaper, more comprehensive streaming services,” Ryan wrote.
“Even RSN subscribers can be blacked out when the league sells the exclusive rights to certain games to streaming services like Prime Video, as happened over 20 times to New York Yankees and Mets fans over the 2023 Major League Baseball (MLB) regular season.”
He also cited the “recent dispute between Charter Spectrum and Disney left Spectrum’s customers blocked from viewing all Disney-owned programming for ten days. As a result, millions of Americans missed out on viewing parts of Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN, the US Open, and the start of the college football and NFL seasons.
“From 2010 to 2022, New York experienced a total of 82 blackouts related to carriage disputes amounting to 3,080 blackout days for subscription services that had been paid for.”
It’s about time someone in government is trying to do something about these broadcast monopolies held by the major sports leagues of America.