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MLB selling the technology behind MLB.tv, BAMTech, to Disney? Sure, that made sense each time they let the Mouse bite off a piece, as the league got a ton of money for the tech that powered a service they could keep using without owning the rights to it and licensing it out themselves, as they had done for WWE and the NHL.
MLB selling MLB.tv itself? Well that’s going to take a little more thinking through. That’s reportedly what’s going down, with ESPN the buyer, as part of a reshuffling by both parties in terms of their baseball broadcasting priorities.
Yahoo Sports Kendall Baker reported as much on Tuesday evening, and while details are to come, you can still paint a picture with what we’ve got available now.
- Apple and MLB will no longer partner together on Friday Night Baseball, but…
- …Peacock will now host Friday Night Baseball, bringing the streaming service back into the mix with MLB after they dropped the Sunday Leadoff game that now airs on Roku.
- In addition, Sunday Night Baseball has found a new home on NBC (which owns and operates Peacock), meaning they’ve got a full, year-round Sunday Night slate of nationally televised sports programming, between MLB, NFL, and NBA.
- Netflix gets the Home Run Derby, which might sound ridiculous on its face, but they do love a tentpole event and they treat them very seriously because they want to be seen as that kind of platform now. The quality of said tentpoles varies, but the Derby is a reliably entertaining one, which should help in their quest to be viewed as a place this sort of thing can air.
- ESPN has been saying — since even before they opted out of their national broadcasting deal with MLB — that they wanted to incorporate local broadcasts into their upcoming streaming app. They’ll be able to do so with access to MLB.tv, though, questions remain on that note.
Questions remain on a whole bunch of notes, actually, and once we get a bit more information — and confirmation — I’ll end up writing about said questions for Baseball Prospectus in as much detail as possible. Quick hit list of the things I’m thinking about here at the moment:
- How do local broadcast rights work for ESPN with MLB.tv, when MLB’s cheat code there was that they were literally MLB and all of the money was being pooled together and redistributed to teams, anyway? Does ESPN have to negotiate 30 rights deals? Is MLB going to serve as a middleman making this happen with ESPN, for a price? Is ESPN simply buying the right to exclusively utilize the service on their app, but the content within the service itself has to be continually negotiated and updated, as is usual for broadcast rights?
- Why is MLB doing this? The Derby and Sunday Night Baseball parts make tons of sense and require no further explanation, but the whole MLB.tv thing is odd on the surface and also under it. Part of me wonders if the goal here is simply to get, in the words of Baker, a “boatload” of cash for something valuable that they can live without… in preparation for an extended lockout. Their out-of-market streaming broadcast service has no value if there are no games to air, but it can be sold while there are games to air. And then MLB has a nice little reserve of cash to help them wait out the players as they maybe try to ram a salary cap through.
- Or is it something less alarming, like MLB still wanting to focus on restructuring how their in-market broadcasting works going forward, so something focused on out-of-market isn’t necessary in a world where an a la carte streaming model that can ignore blackouts exists?
- Man there’s a lot of contradictions to work through.
It’s difficult to fully discern anything from this until we know what the numbers look like. Is the new Peacock deal an upgrade on the Apple one? Will MLB get more for Sunday Night Baseball and the Home Run Derby than they did with ESPN, or less? Just what have these two parties determine that MLB.tv is worth, and how are they sorting out the actual broadcast rights contained within? We’ll get there, though.
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