[miamibre]

MLB in the US does the same thing for the regular season, it's awesome despite the blackouts which prevent you from watching your local team but you can get around that with a simple VPN. But alas I believe that they will be making the service part of ESPN which will undoubtedly make the product worse just like they will do with NFL Red Zone.

The problem is that leagues miss out on billions of dollars of revenue when they do this AND they also have to maintain the streaming service which is way outside their technical wheelhouse.

MLS also has a pretty straightforward streaming service through AppleTV which I also enjoy.

What i find weird is that people complain (at least in the case of the MLS deal) that it's a BAD thing, that somehow having an easily accessible service that you just pay for and get access to without a contract or cable is diminishing popularity / discoverability of the product?

[rkomorn]

> The problem is that leagues miss out on billions of dollars of revenue when they do this

TBH, I have a hard time believing statements like this because if the revenue difference was really there, they'd make the switch.

If there's one thing I'll give credit to US sports leagues for, it's knowing how to make money.

[miamibre]

After rereading my comment I think I was a bit vague, but i'll try to clarify.

Most leagues DO sell their rights to other big companies to have them handle it however they see fit for a large annual fee.

MLB does it partially, some games are shown through cable tv (There are so many games a year that only a small portion is actually aired nationally) the rest are done via regional sports networks (RSNs) that aren't shown nationally. In order to make some money out of this situation MLB created MLBtv that lets you watch all games as long as there are not nationally aired or a local team that is serviced by a RSN. Recently there have been changes because one of the biggest conglomerate of RSNs has gone bankrupt forcing MLB to buy them out and MLB is trying to negotiate a new national cable package with the big telecoms. I believe ESPN has negotiated with MLB to buy out MLBtv but details are scarce.

MLS is a smaller league and Apple bought out exclusive streaming rights for 10 years for some ungodly amount of money. NFL and NBA also have some streaming options but I am less knowledgeable about them but I assume it's similar to MLBtv where there are too many games to broadcast so you can just watch them with a subscription to their service.

In the end of the day these massive deals are the biggest source of revenue for the leagues and the more ways they can divide up the pie among different companies they can extract more money in total. Just looking that the amount of contracts for the US alone is overwhelming.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_broadcasting_contracts_...