A streaming-only option for Kansas City Royals, Sporting KC fans may have hit a snag
Kansas City Royals fans without a cable subscription made their voices heard this season as they lamented not having a streaming option for watching games.
The only way to watch the Royals inside their local market area was to have a cable subscription, which included access to the Bally Sports Kansas City app, or use the AT&T TV streaming service.
Cord cutters who had previously watched on streaming services like YouTube TV, Hulu and Sling, were out of luck because of a dispute between those companies and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns Bally Sports Kansas City.
Some good news seemed to be on the horizon as Sinclair announced it hoped to have a direct-to-consumer app for fans without a cable subscription ready by 2022.
But those plans may have hit a snag.
Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred was asked Tuesday at the CAA World Congress of Sports about Sinclair’s plan to roll out the app.
According to the Sports Business Journal, Manfred said Sinclair does not have digital rights from enough clubs to have a viable direct-to-consumer app.
“The other set of rights they’ve talked a lot about is gambling rights, they don’t have those either ...,” Manfred said. “We’ve been very clear with them from the beginning that we see both those sets of rights as extraordinarily valuable to baseball, and we’re not just going to throw them in to help Sinclair out.”
Sinclair’s long-range plan is to one day allow fans to bet on the games they’re watching, but that also appears to be nowhere near to becoming a reality.
A story in The Athletic quoted Manfred as saying Major League Baseball doesn’t seek an equity stake in a direct-to-consumer app. It wants to control it.
“And we want to own and control the platform on which they’re delivered and may have partners in that process,” Manfred said. “But you know, this idea that late in the discussions, you know, we somehow demanded an equity stake. That’s just not accurate.”
MLB already owns a direct-to-consumer option for fans: MLB TV, but that blacks out games in a local market, leaving Royals fans in Missouri, Kansas and some surrounding areas unable to watch.
There’s another potential issue that could trickle down to Royals fans.
“(T)op executives from leagues and media companies share a common belief that the Sinclair subsidiary Diamond Sports Group, which owns 21 Bally Sports-branded RSNs, could be headed into bankruptcy,” the Sports Journal’s John Ourand reported earlier this week.
Those RSNs (Regional Sports Networks), include Bally Sports Kansas City. Manfred said Tuesday that Black Diamond’s debt burden was a “huge number” and worrisome.
On a positive note, Manfred acknowledged the need for streaming options for fans.
“The key for us is the development of direct-to-consumer products to increase our reach,” Manfred said per SBJ. “Our issue, the biggest problem for us on the RSN side, is that even within the cable bundle, particularly with the Diamond subsidiaries, their reach within the bundle is not what it used to be. It’s important for us to develop digital products that allow us to get to our fans in a frictionless way, and that’s really our future.”
