Will MLB Out Fox The Others?

One sports media story which bears watching over the next couple of weeks is the fate of the 21 Fox regional sports networks, which will be purchased by a new buyer between April 15th and June 18th.
The RSN's are owned for the short term by Disney, which is required to unload the Fox Sports group due to its ownership of ESPN. (June 18 marks 90 days after the closing on the deal in which Disney purchased 21st Century Fox.)

What makes this so interesting is that Fox Business News reports that Major League Baseball is among the entities bidding on the group.

While it is understandable that MLB would like to generate additional income from monthly subscriptions and advertising revenue from the networks which televise many of its teams, this possibility raises ethical questions. MLB would want for the teams it televises to be competitive to attract ratings and advertisers, but not have these rights for all of the teams.

MLB owns MLB Network, along with MLB-TV. As of now, no pro sports leagues own any regional networks which feature one or more local teams.

The process for this sale includes sealed bids which are binding. The sale price for the group is expected to be between $10 billion and $20 billion. Obviously, there is a lot at stake. Fox Business reported that other bidders include Liberty Media (which owns Sirius/XM, which has MLB radio broadcast rights) and Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns TV stations across the country.

Among the RSN's in the group are Fox Sports South, Fox Sports Ohio, Fox Sports Wisconsin, and Fox Sports Midwest.It is not certain whether entities such as Amazon and Yahoo will submit bids, which need to be done by an April 15th deadline.


Research conducted by Nielsen between August 2018 and January of 2019 shows that ESPN Radio attracted more than 22 million listeners to its live play-by-play events during that time period. The number of listeners account for 9.2% of the population.

What makes this impressive is that their broadcasts are not exclusive in local team markets and were "duplicate" broadcasts. In most cases, such as the college football championship broadcasts, fans prefer the call of the school's broadcaster. Same for all of the MLB post-season games, where the ESPN feed was competing against the regular team broadcasts in local markets as well as their network of regional stations. This time period included the MLB post-season, some NFL regular season games, NBA regular season broadcasts, and select college football regular season games along with the college football playoffs.

There are some analysts pointing to the number of cord-cutters dumping their cable and satellite providers that may be returning to radio broadcasts to keep in touch with the games. How ironic, given the monthly fee ESPN forces upon most subscribers whether they are sports fans or not.


OKLAHOMA CITY: Congratulations to AL Eschbach on being inducted into the Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame this week. Eschbach goes back to being named Sports Director of KTOK back in 1976. In the mid-80's he joined WWLS-AM prior to the station becoming a sports station. All these years later he is still on the air, now on WWLS-FM where he joins Jim Traber, Dean Blevins, and Berry Tramel during afternoon drive.