Are local blackouts hurting baseball?

Does anyone know the percentage of revenues - or more precisely the percentage of profits - derived from ticket sales versus other forms of income, most notably local TV contracts?  Can ticket sales significantly swing the profitability of a club assuming a 10-20% swing in attendance?

I didn't know there were still blackouts. You mean you can't watch home games with premium cable service?  Or you mean the blackout on the MLB online stream?

FWIW, the Blue Jays are driving amazing TV ratings throughout Canada, with the game on Sunday drawing 5X the NFL audience. They averaged a national TV audience of 4.7 million viewers for their final game against the Rangers, with a peak of more than 7 million Canadians tuning in -- that is 20% of the country, equivalent to 64 million Americans. Incredible.

https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/bl...port--210943993.html

2017LHPscrewball posted:

Does anyone know the percentage of revenues - or more precisely the percentage of profits - derived from ticket sales versus other forms of income, most notably local TV contracts?  Can ticket sales significantly swing the profitability of a club assuming a 10-20% swing in attendance?

No on profits, private enterprise with closed books.

Ticket sales / revenue are almost all profit (guessing 90%), so take attendance times increase% times avg ticket price times 90% for increase in profit.

JCG posted:

I didn't know there were still blackouts. You mean you can't watch home games with premium cable service?  Or you mean the blackout on the MLB online stream?

Carriage disputes are the only blackouts I am aware of.  I'm not sure if there are currently any disputes stopping the showing of local MLB games.  Astros were off TV for almost three years.  Just came back two years ago.

9/16 Congress is considering new legislation not allowing local blackouts of sporting events. 

There are ways around the blackouts of the MLB, NFL, NHL and NBA packages. One is a VPN. The other is KODI.

JCG, In our area it's both.  MLB.com streaming subscription blacks out games that are within some distance....   I  believe 5 hour drive of the ballpark, but I'm not certain.  I have read about ways to get around it by using a VPN server from another area, but I have not tried that.  We used to subscribe, but stopped a few years ago due to the blackouts.  And for games that are covered by the cable carriers, they typically have an "either/or" game...  and we get the game on the other side of the country (not the game of the team closest to us).

masterofnone posted:

JCG, In our area it's both.  MLB.com streaming subscription blacks out games that are within some distance....   I  believe 5 hour drive of the ballpark, but I'm not certain.  I have read about ways to get around it by using a VPN server from another area, but I have not tried that.  We used to subscribe, but stopped a few years ago due to the blackouts.  And for games that are covered by the cable carriers, they typically have an "either/or" game...  and we get the game on the other side of the country (not the game of the team closest to us).

You can beat the blackout with a VPN.  Just make sure you have access to a VPN located in North America. MLB.tv is locking out subscriptions they discover located in other parts of the world. It's a giveaway you're on a VPN.

the blackouts are not so much to boost ticket sales but because of the local cable stations. 

big market teams have huge local contracts (I think Dodgers have something like 3 billions for 20 years). those contracts are higher than ever before so it pays for the teams. 

maybe they lose some fans that way but they make a ton of money.

live gate audience is not such a big consideration anymore. when radio came up in the in the 20s there was a fear people would stay at home but that hasn't really happened. 

so unless mlb TV starts to pay each team 100m a year the blackouts won't go away. 

The greatest threat to professional sports: cord cutting. It is currently mucking up the revenue model, and the sooner they (pro sports) reconfigure their models and not fear throwing out the baby with the bathwater, the better.

Hate the fact I can't watch the playoffs.  I have not been able to watch the Al or the NL series.

Florida State Fan posted:

Hate the fact I can't watch the playoffs.  I have not been able to watch the Al or the NL series.

Go to Walmart. Buy a $69 Xiaomi Mi Box. Download KODI from the Google Play Store. Then find add ons Phoenix, Exodus and Pro Sport. You will have all the cable channels in at least 720 and most sports links. You have to take the time to figure out which links are better than others.

The PAC 12 conference made a ridiculous decision to not allow internet subscriptions to PAC 12 Network. KODI is how I get PAC 12 LA without bugging friends in LA for their cable password.

Receiving these signals is not breaking the law. The makers of the box are not breaking the law. KODI is not breaking the law. The people putting out the signal without buying a distribution license are breaking the law. Your kid probably knows all about KODI and how to make it work.

A way to get the games on your PC is firstrow.eu and click on baseball. I haven't tried First Row in a few years. I know it used to work. It doesn't scale well to tv if you connect your PC to the tv.

i learned this stuff from my son when he went off to college. 

Don't want to debate the morality of KODI etc, but just want to point out that if somebody wishes to watch the MLB playoffs, doesn't have access to basic cable, and does want to utilize a 100% legal stream, you can get a Roku device for well under $100 and subscribe to Sling for $25  per month and get all the channels you need and many more.  The Roku box will also handle hundreds of other channels, both paid and free.

JCG posted:

Don't want to debate the morality of KODI etc, but just want to point out that if somebody wishes to watch the MLB playoffs, doesn't have access to basic cable, and does want to utilize a 100% legal stream, you can get a Roku device for well under $100 and subscribe to Sling for $25  per month and get all the channels you need and many more.  The Roku box will also handle hundreds of other channels, both paid and free.

Sling is great. However, for me, living out in the sticks, it doesn't include local channels and there are no transmitters within antennae range. So, for games on Fox, I use FoxGo and my old cable sign in, which strangely still works for WatchESPN, HBO, etc even though I disconnected seven months ago.

We went one year w/ out cable and really didn't miss very much. Only reason I went back was a) I did miss some shows like "The Americans" and "Fargo" on FX, which was not part of Sling at the time. b) somebody told me about the Comcast "retention" department, which  allowed me to get what I was getting before for about 33% of what I had been paying.  

As for local, ABC, NBC, FOX, PBS, and CBS all have online channels and I can't remember any of those being an issue except for NFL, which I'm trying to wean myself from anyway. 

JCG posted:

We went one year w/ out cable and really didn't miss very much. Only reason I went back was a) I did miss some shows like "The Americans" and "Fargo" on FX, which was not part of Sling at the time. b) somebody told me about the Comcast "retention" department, which  allowed me to get what I was getting before for about 33% of what I had been paying.  

As for local, ABC, NBC, FOX, PBS, and CBS all have online channels and I can't remember any of those being an issue except for NFL, which I'm trying to wean myself from anyway. 

I originally used Playstation Vue which offers a better package than Sling at a better price, but has drawbacks. The menu is slow and hard to use and you can't use it away from your home internet connection. It also has a bad habit of skipping back a second or two (almost flawlessly) which was annoying when trying to watch sports. The one thing I miss from Vue, though is the DVR feature. Haven't once regretted moving away from cable, though.

Thanks. I do have cable though. I found it on fox sports.  For those North Carolinians I found it on Time Warner it's on channel 400/401. The mlb channel is on 306.

Blackouts support local television, but what happens when people like me live over 50 miles away from local satellites and I only have cable, which blacks out my local teams?   I don't know if MLB blacks out its streams, but NBA does and it's just ridiculous because you pay to watch your favorite home team, but 50-75% of their games are blacked out.  I'm not going to shell out a couple hundred bucks for a giant, ugly antenna on my roof just to get local broadcasts.  In the end they're reducing their number of fans and that's precisely why the Rams left L.A. to begin with and now they're back hoping the excitement of the team coming back to L.A. will bring in the fans that they would've lost to blackouts.  In 10 years if this is still an issue they'll leave town again and another team will come to L.A.  

I have cable in one home.  The Apple TV and an Android boxes go back and forth between the homes. What a lot of people with cable don't realize if they access ESPN and Fox Sports through the apps rather than cable via Apple, Android or PC  they can access everything being broadcast in the country and not just what is being broadcast into your region.

Many options for watching any game you want to watch...ask your son. The kids of today network very well and share all types of secrets when it comes to technology. I am sure he can show you a few ways to get the MLB game you want to watch...

hsbaseball101 posted:

Blackouts support local television, but what happens when people like me live over 50 miles away from local satellites and I only have cable, which blacks out my local teams?   I don't know if MLB blacks out its streams, but NBA does and it's just ridiculous because you pay to watch your favorite home team, but 50-75% of their games are blacked out.  I'm not going to shell out a couple hundred bucks for a giant, ugly antenna on my roof just to get local broadcasts.  In the end they're reducing their number of fans and that's precisely why the Rams left L.A. to begin with and now they're back hoping the excitement of the team coming back to L.A. will bring in the fans that they would've lost to blackouts.  In 10 years if this is still an issue they'll leave town again and another team will come to L.A.  

The revenues are becoming so large other than gate revenues I wonder how long blackouts will have value. Advertisers can't reached blacked out viewers. That's were the money is. 

I usually go to a pro sporting event per month in the big four. I'll pay for decent seats. A friend gave me free tickets to a Celtics game last year. They were center court in the balcony. But they weren't exactly in the front row. In fact, they were in the back row. Because my friend and I go to games anyway we decided watching on tv was better than the seats we received free.

Being fans who go to games there wasn't the one time thrill of being inside. If it was a playoff game any seat inside with the excitement is better than tv.