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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I wish MLB would take some notes one what a good streaming service looks like.

If you want to watch all the baseball games you need an MLB.tv subscription, a premium cable subscription, a Peacock subscription, a regional sports network subscription (it’s Bally Sports where I am), and an Apple TV subscription. Please give me an everything tier in MLB.tv! I’ll gladly pay more.

On top of that MLB.tv is brutal to watch because they have a lot of ad spots and only a few advertisers so you see the same ads over-and-over-and-over again.

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This is generally due to the ownership structure being different in MLB versus MLS. MLS is centrally owned so the league can easily make whatever deal it wants for broadcast rights. MLB isn't centrally owned and therefore the goals of the league are often in conflict with individual owners. The owner of the Yankees doesn't want MLB.tv to devalue the Yankees' investment in the YES (Yankee Entertainment and Sports) Network for example. That leads to complicated rights in which different entities own different pieces of the broadcast rights.

Once this system came into place, it becomes incredibly difficult to unwind because there are now hundreds of media contracts between dozens of different entities. They can't just introduce an all-inclusive MLB.tv without breaking a lot of those contracts and they can't just wait until those contracts expire because they all were signed independently and therefore have their own timeframes.

And things are worse if you're in Iowa:

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/sports/baseball/2021...

> Currently, six MLB teams are blacked out all across Iowa: the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago White Sox, Minnesota Twins, Kansas City Royals and Milwaukee Brewers. Those teams are not available to watch with an MLB.tv subscription or when they are often aired on national broadcasts. Some of those clubs are not available on Iowa’s main cable packages either.

Blackout rules really need to be called into question by the government. It's dumb that if I want to watch a game and I live within like 3 hours of the stadium, I have to actually go to the game or pirate a stream. The rules need to be refined to a small area within a a half hour's drive from a stadium, and that's it.

Blackouts these days aren’t about filling seats, it’s all about television rights. Regional sports networks buy exclusive broadcast rights to games for particular teams in some region and that results in a blackout.

In Hawaii, for example, most of the west coast baseball teams are often blacked out in MLB.tv because some broadcaster has picked up the rights for those teams. Nobody from Hawaii is going to fly to Seattle to see a game because of a blackout.

I do not see why the government would need to get involved in the transaction of leisure activities.

Any yet baseball has an anti-trust exemption. And twenty years ago, there were congressional hearings on the use of steroids in baseball.

While I agree with you in principle, the state has an interest in preventing anti-competitive activities, and what the GP described seems to fit.

It's not anticompetitive if it's literally not competing.

Actually spot on. I went to the ballpark for the very first time with my teenager to watch the Giants play not once but twice. Though the view from the bleachers is not all that bad, I would kill to watch it in an immersive platform like the Apple Vision Pro. And that is where Apple TV + MLS pass comes in. They control the soup to nuts of that transmission. 4K streaming coupled with drone cameras, Messi Cam will make Vision Pro a very compelling device if You want to be present at a stadium without being there.

The NHL has similar issues. There are regional blackouts and it's a pain to figure out what you can watch, where to watch, and how much everything costs. It's just too much hassle for a lot of people vs an IPTV sub with everything for a couple hundred bucks a year.

If the NHL looked toward Apple during the next cycle, I would be ecstatic as long as they kept the local broadcasting crews. No blackouts, added content, and significantly higher streaming quality.

Sometimes I feel as if I need 10 different subscriptions to watch a single NHL season.

This is literally killing NHL for me.

I grew up playing hockey. I think NHL playoffs are some of the best, most intense sporting events.

However, it's so dang hard for me to consistently watch the NHL that I've kind of stopped caring.

I wish it hadn't come to this, but SportSurge and its mirrors have nearly every game from many different sources. I grew up watching games free over the air on CBC; I just can't stomach paying hundreds a year for what used to be free.

In my country rugby is declining and football (soccer) is increasing in popularity. I would imagine MLB has little growth opportunity in the USA, unlike soccer, so they have little incentive to improve the experience.

I think you're right but it's also a fascinating commentary on the times where a sport that's been quintessentially American (baseball) is probably at all time lows with popularity while highly international sports (F1, Soccer) are finally seeing growth here.

It's probably a complicated story. At least suburban kids play soccer rather than baseball/softball (or even American football) growing up these days. I imagine basketball is still pretty popular especially in cities. F1 vs. NASCAR? Don't really know the numbers--obviously that's a sport that most viewers never participated in.

Although I played it in college, rugby has always been at least something out of the mainstream in most places.

Rugby (which is actually a number of different sports: league, union, touch & sevens) is mainstream in many countries, but parents are less inclined to let their kids play a sport where concussions are rife. Rugby also does not have protective gear so there is less perception of protection (even though it is well accepted that the protective gear can make the problem worse).

Woman's rugby is increasing in popularity and represents a growth opportunity.

From my tenuous connections, rugby does seem to be a sport that has some popularity among women who want a more physical sport relative to alternatives. (Which I don't mean at all negatively.)

As you also say, a lot of the same brain injury concerns that apply to American football also apply to rugby to at least some degree--probably lower speed/less high impact but a lot less protective gear--and, at least at the high level of the men's sport, it's gotten faster with bigger players.

Baseball was getting less and less fun to watch. MLB is trying to fix it by speeding up the game, and basically penalizing people for turning every game into marathon low hit count affairs.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/07/basebal...

I think baseball is eventually on it's way out. 162 games is far too many for any game to be meaningful and the actual games have very few exciting moments.

To me, baseball is the sport that gets put on as the background noise in the bar when nothing else is on.

I think it's still pretty big worldwide. There might be fewer people at the games but it's still a massive industry.

Attendance depends heavily on the market. Dodgers fans fill the seats no matter the premium the owners put on the ticket.

I watched some instagram video from MLB where players were mic’ed up - it was much more compelling than commentators.

It was more like twitch for baseball. I think that could be very compelling.

You can’t do that all the time because players like to trash talk and banter and much of that cannot go on air. A good announcer is really nice. You can follow the game hearing it in the next room without having to see it.

At least Manfred has been vocal that he agrees blackouts are a problem. It’s one of the only positives I can think of about him.

Part of the issue is due to how baseball has been broadcast historically on local networks. Teams like the Dodgers have very lucrative TV contracts with their local station. I imagine it’ll be somewhat of a legal and business mess for the MLB to negotiate an end to black outs with all those stations

For MLB that is a feature not a bug!

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