The commissioner of the Major League Baseball (MLB) Rob Manfred is convinced that the future of MLB content distribution is digital, The New York Post reported this month that Major League Baseball is in talks to launch its own nationwide video-streaming service that would allow fans to watch their hometown team’s games without a cable TV subscription.
According to Sportico, the league is said to be exploring an agreement to launch a new streaming service with the NBA and the NHL, so Manfred suggested that digital rights would remain under the control of the league and its 30 clubs, without import the form the product takes. In this context, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver believes that in the long term, competitions such as the NBA must adopt a direct-to-consumer (DTC) content distribution model.
In the same conference, Rob Manfred noted that he does not consider the $ 250 million plan for Sinclair Broadcast Group to finance a streaming service that concentrates baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey and college sports from the markets it is currently licensed for, considering that the US telecommunications conglomerate does not have enough digital rights to carry it out.
“Sinclair doesn’t have enough digital rights from enough clubs to have a viable direct-to-consumer product,” Rob Manfred said Oct. 11 at the CAA World Congress of Sports in New York and later declared that the league was not going to bail out RSNs. .
“We have been very clear from the beginning that we see (broadcast and betting) rights as extraordinarily valuable to baseball, and we are not just putting them aside to help Sinclair,” he added.
According to New York Post, the new service of the MLB It could be launched in 2023 and the idea is to pay less expensive rates than those currently paid for cable television service, so that locals can enjoy the home games of their teams; while the service MLB.TV, which offers the games from outside the local markets, would remain active.
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