The Royals and Sporting KC didn’t create this problem. But they’ll suffer from it
This column is not about me, and we’ll get into the why soon, but my experience here is relevant ... so that’s where we’ll start.
The Mellingers are cord-cutters. Our Internet can handle it, I dig the ease and accessibility, we no longer have a cord running the baseboards of the back room in our very old house, and we saved something like $40 a month. That’s a lot of nachos.
You might know that Royals and Sporting Kansas City games will be unavailable to virtually all Kansas City cord-cutters this season. There is a small chance that might change, but there’s also a small chance a UFO will land in my backyard and make me king of Krankocon, a planet where it’s always 58 degrees and cheeseburgers are as healthy as broccoli. Won’t have to worry about sports then.
Anyway, we’re not going back to cable. The contracts, the hassle, the cords, the price, the clunkiness all stink. So we switched from YouTube TV to AT&T TV, the only streaming option for Royals and Sporting KC games.
Here’s what we had to do: cancel a service we enjoyed, buy streaming sticks for all our TVs and sign up for an otherwise inferior package that will cost about $20 more per month.
Between the hardware and the higher monthly cost, we will have spent about $280 more to watch games by the time the seasons are over. That’s a lot of nachos.
We sports fans get angry when we’re reminded we root for businesses, and nobody needs the hassle and extra cost, but the truth is this was an easy decision, and not just because of this weird job. I’d climb on our roof and attach bunny ears in a lightning storm to have baseball and soccer on my TV.
So, again: This is not about me. The problem is much bigger than the Mellingers.
Let’s talk.
Some background
Sinclair Broadcast Group is a publicly traded conglomerate of TV stations that bought Fox Sports affiliates, including Fox Sports Kansas City, in August 2019. Sinclair has essentially been in a mutually destructive flexing contest with distributors ever since.
Dish Network and Sling TV dropped Fox Sports Networks last summer. FuboTV did the same last January. YouTube TV and Hulu+ Live TV followed last October. The result is that a sizable chunk of Kansas Citians are left without games on their TVs — AT&T TV accounts for about 6 percent of streamers nationwide.
Sinclair blames distributors for being unwilling “to engage in good faith discussions” according to a corporate statement, but the truth is the problems escalated when Sinclair showed up.
Now, here’s the other side: Distributors believe Sinclair leads with unreasonable asks.
The truth is that customers do not care which collection of suits wins the negotiation.
There are literally billions of dollars at stake, with conflicting interests in a constantly shifting new reality that is forcing time-tested institutions to rethink their business models (and will leave some in the dust).
Contracts and lawyers are involved, so as you might expect the conversations with people involved are usually conducted privately.
But Jake Reid, Sporting KC’s CEO, didn’t mind being quoted.
“Hugely frustrating,” Reid said. “The reason we did the deal with Fox at the time was because of the wide distribution. The goalposts have changed on that, so we’re trying to figure out what that looks like for us long-term. But this is not an acceptable solution for us to get games to fans, as it stands right now.”
Now, look. Teams get paid for these deals, and the Royals are in the second year of a new contract that more than doubled their payments from the last contract (which was horrific, but still). Sporting is in the second year of a three-year pact, and even that relatively short period of time covers enough ground for many unknowns.
Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley has signaled a direct-to-consumer model coming next year; it’s debatable whether that would be better for teams than the current setup. The Royals aren’t giving the money back, but like Sporting and the St. Louis Cardinals, the Boston Red Sox and every other team in the middle of this fight, being easily available on TV is critical for business.
Industry data indicates about 13 percent of TV households nationwide are on streaming platforms. Specific data for Kansas City is unknown, but Reid said “easily over 30 percent” of Sporting fans would currently be unable to access games.
This all comes at a time when customers have more entertainment options than ever and increasingly demand all of technology’s conveniences, so the argument from Sinclair that games are available on cable or a scarcely used and more expensive streaming option is thoroughly unconvincing.
Also, just being real here, but this is a pretty rotten moment in the history of humans to be making your product more inconvenient for consumers.
“If demand for sports before the pandemic was a 9, and now it’s coming back about a 7 …” said David Carter, principal of the Sports Business Group and founding partner of Altius Sports Partners. “People have found so many other reasons not to worry about watching games. … There’s a broader issue about how do we as an industry deal with the fact that demand might be off for a very long time?”
Now we’re getting to the fat and juicy — with a good bark, because this is Kansas City, after all — part of the story. Now we’re hitting on why this is so important, and why this is going to be an issue for years.
And why this column is very, very, extremely not about me.
So here we are
The Mellingers will have baseball and soccer in their house. My wife and I will make sure of that, and our kids will have every — is this the right word? — opportunity to love sports like we do. Ours is a household that the suits running Sinclair and any distributor can comfortably take for granted.
But how many families are like mine?
Look, we want to be gracious here. The ways people are accessing entertainment are changing constantly. Some fans have been on the same cable subscription for decades and just want to continue to watch games there. Some have never had cable, some just want highlights on their phone, and others might hit a post on Instagram (but you better get them at the right moment).
All of those fans have power, they all have choice and they all feel like their teams should be available to them on their own terms.
This is an incredible challenge, and one that smart people will spend the next decade trying to solve. The degree of difficulty is turned up to a 12, too — there’s not as many of us who are willing to juggle flaming knives in order to watch games as there used to be.
The NFL’s new TV deals say a lot about where the industry is headed. New contracts are worth nearly double of those they replace, and for the first time ever they include a regular streaming-only game.
That’s where this thing is headed, and the people at Sinclair pointing to cable distribution as a sign their games are easily accessible know it. Baseball, in particular, is walking close to the cliff’s edge — all NFL games remain available over the air locally, football is something like bulletproof in America, and baseball is trending toward becoming an extra in one of those Dr. Rick commercials.
The average age of MLB fans is 57 — by far the oldest of America’s major sports leagues.
If you printed out directions to get here today, you’re in the right place.
This is where the concern comes in: The viewers being cut off from watching the Royals right now are disproportionately young. They are the people baseball should be trying everything possible to appeal to, and not just them, but their kids, too.
Baseball should and is making other efforts to reach young people. They are packaging highlights in interesting ways, including on social media, knowing that young people are less interested in watching entire games of any sport.
But MLB also knows there is no substitute for games being accessible, which they know is the best way to convince someone to buy a ticket or a T-shirt. And MLB knows that more and more young people are being shut out from watching games every year.
These are people who are willing to pay for entertainment and value convenience and accessibility and will see the opposite if they happen to look at baseball. What they will see is a league that is telling them they are not needed, and doing it at a time when the interest is already diminished, and the alternative options are already increased.
It’s never been easier to say goodbye to baseball or, worse yet, never say hello.
Pretty awful way to go about growing a business, especially one that’s not a business to a lot of us.
This story was originally published March 26, 2021 at 5:00 AM.