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I wonder if one day MLB will understand that blackouts are just plain stupid. Just run ads during the breaks and make money!
With cable companies, satellite companies, and local TV stations all wanting a piece of the pie, blackout restrictions are unlikely to end anytime soon.
They could split ads with the TV channels, and ask $25 extra for the subscription from those who want to follow the local team.
One time I talked to a guy who works at BAM, and asked him about this. He said they want to end the blackouts as much as anyone else. The problem is how baseball is structured as a business. He explained it like this:
Each franchise owns their own broadcast rights. Approx a third of the teams also own their own cable channel for broadcasting local games (NESN is owned by the Red Sox, YES is owned by the Yankees) and the rest license their distribution rights to local networks; usually Comcast Sports Network or FOX Sports or whatever local equivalent. MLB doesn’t own any of the local broadcast rights.
A while back, before internet streaming, MLB negotiated the right to broadcast nationally all non-local games. It made sense then - you watch your local game on your local channel and if you’re a super fan you pay for the expensive MLB package and watch the rest of the games too. Today, this doesn’t make as much sense anymore.
To end the blackouts: MLB has to buy the local distribution rights from each franchise, which is never going to happen; all the media companies / channels that have local distribution rights have to agree to allow MLB to stream in their local areas, which is also highly unlikely.
The closest movement has been from the areas where the teams do not own their own channels. Never thought I would praise Comcast, but it and Fox and the like have been close to a deal in the past, allegedly, to broadcast each other's games and allow unblocked streaming on MLB for a share of the revenue. That would still mean games on NESN and YES and the like would be blacked out, but maybe if 2/3 of the games became unblocked the rest would fall soon too.
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The benefit of smartDNS over a VPN for this usecase is it doesn’t slow down your streaming speed at all.
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Yup. Upgrade fee plus ads. The tech is there. The money can work. The demand exists.