Kansas City Royals TV schedule is set, but cord cutters may still face frustration

Fox Sports Kansas City, set to be rebranded as Bally Sports Kansas City on March 31, announced this week it will broadcast 161 of the Royals’ 162 regular season games.

The other game, June 26 at the Texas Rangers, will air on FS1.

But many Royals fans in the team’s broadcast territory who’ve cut the cord and moved away from traditional cable and/or satellite television could be blocked from watching games this season.

Streaming services Hulu, YouTube TV, FuboTV and Sling do not currently carry the regional sports networks previously owned by Fox and now owned by Sinclair Broadcasting.

Those RSNs include FSKC/Bally Sports Kansas City.

“Sinclair remains committed to reaching a fair agreement with both Hulu and YouTube TV to carry the Fox RSNs,” Sinclair Broadcasting said in a recent statement. “At no time have we demanded exorbitant fees for these channels. Instead, we have consistently offered both pay TV providers extremely fair deals in line with what hundreds of other TV services have agreed to and continue to agree to. ...

“At this point we have no choice but to conclude that neither Disney (which owns Hulu) nor Google (which owns YouTube) is willing to engage in good faith discussions or return the RSNs to their platforms.”

In the Kansas City metro area, Bally Sports KC is available through DirecTV, Spectrum (Charter) and Xfinity (Comcast), AT&T TV, AT&T U-verse, Consolidated Communications, Google Fiber and MidCo TV. Outside Kansas City, current options include Suddenlink, Mediacom, and Cox in addition to DirecTV.

The Royals have declined comment on the negotiations between Sinclair and the streaming services that currently don’t carry the RSNs.

Last season, Royals local market TV ratings ranked sixth in Major League Baseball (by percentage of the local market). It was the Royals’ eighth straight season in the top 10.

So far this year, spring training viewership is up 86% compared to last year and 71% compared to 2019.

Sinclair Broadcast Group plans to have a new streaming app ready for the MLB season that will replace the Fox Sports Go app. But to watch this season’s games on the app, fans would need to purchase a TV package that includes Bally Sports KC.

This winter, Sinclair’s CEO Chris Ripley said during an earnings call in December that a direct-to-consumer service is in the works for 2022.

While it’s not clear how significant a portion of the local market has cut the cord, NoCable.org estimates national cord-cutting accounted for 19.9% of US households in 2020.

Emarketer.com projects more than one-third of US households will have cut the pay TV cord by 2024. That would leave 77.6 million U.S. households with cable, satellite, or telecom TV packages.

This story was originally published March 20, 2021 at 9:03 AM.