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LAS VEGAS — Broadcasters are rethinking their relationships with live sports due to the recent dramatic downturn in the regional sports network business.
Earlier this year, Sinclair-owned Diamond Sports missed a $140 million debt payment before declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and it missed payments to three Major League Baseball teams: the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Cleveland Guardians and the Minnesota Twins. Warner Bros. Discovery declared that it was exiting the business and shutting down its four AT&T Sports Networks. And NBCUniversal sold its remaining 67% stake in one of its four regional sports networks, NBC Sports Washington, to Monumental Sports & Entertainment.
What seems like the sudden demise of a long-running business is due to the rapid change in how media is distributed and consumed. Regional sports networks (RSNs) snatched up sports programming rights, paying large license fees to leagues and teams, and then made money via cable and satellite TV carriage. But that model did not foresee how quickly cord-cutting would overtake the pay TV model.
“We’re at a moment in time where the model doesn’t work for teams and leagues anymore,” said Brian Lawlor, president, Scripps Sports at The E.W. Scripps Co., during a panel on “The Future of Sports on TV” at TVNewsCheck’s Programming Everywhere conference during NAB Show in Las Vegas on Sunday. “That was built on cable and satellite reaching 80% or more of households and markets. Now with cord-cutting, sports are reaching less than 50% or 40% of households in a market. That’s a broken