When it comes to cable television, if you haven’t cut the cord by now, chances are the cord is cutting you. Cable bills get more painful each year, and that discomfort you feel comes from the carriage fees associated with regional sports networks, or RSNs—the cable channels that carry partisan telecasts of Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League. We’ll explore the history and future of regional sports networks in this story of how cheap cable programming became big business—too big for its own good.
The 1970s: Braves New World
We begin in the 1970s with an epiphany from Ted Turner: sports, compared to scripted programming, are cost-effective content. Turner purchased Atlanta’s underachieving UHF channel 17 and the rights to local Atlanta Braves telecasts, ultimately buying the team outright and guaranteeing roughly 450 hours a year of live, local programming. After Turner purchased a satellite transponder, we came to know channel 17 better as the superstation TBS, which brought Braves games not just to the Southeast but to households across America.
The 1980s: Enter SportsChannel
In 1980s New York, after Madison Square Garden brought the Knicks and Rangers to the select few who were wired for cable, one cable company would capitalize on two new phenomena unique to suburban Long Island: plentiful cable subscribers and the NHL’s dynastic New York Islanders. Cablevision’s SportsChannel would grow from the exclusive home for Isles games to a group of channels serving teams in other media markets. As more households connected to cable, more teams migrated from fuzzy, over-the-air UHF stations to crystal-clear pay TV. The modern RSN was born.
Turn of the Millennium: Back to Basics
From MIT and Harvard to Fenway and the Garden, Boston is a hub for innovation. Here, the Red Sox and Bruins realized they could cut out the middleman: rather than sell their broadcast rights to a cable outlet, they could create their own and control two critical revenue streams: commercial inventory and viewer subscriptions. Their New England Sports Network raked in money as a premium service, but it wasn’t until successfully moving to basic cable in 2001 that NESN broke the bank. By making it a basic offering rather than a premium option, NESN would collect a nominal carriage fee from every cable subscriber in New England. You used to have to buy a ticket to see a ballgame. Now, your monthly bill bought it for you—whether you didn’t miss a game or couldn’t stand a minute.
The 2000s: Pigs Get Fat
Teams found this arrangement appealing. They gradually abandoned cable channels owned by conglomerates like Fox and Cablevision. The Yankees left MSG to start the YES Network, while Comcast poached Chicago’s teams from Fox by offering equity in a new RSN. Even colleges got in on the action with the launch of the Big Ten Network. RSNs were licenses to print money.
The 2010s: Hogs Get Slaughtered
The printers didn’t expect the internet. Emerging streaming services led cable subscribers to ask themselves whether they really needed to pay for expensive channels they didn’t watch—the Cubs’ new Marquee Sports Network costs over six dollars a month, even in baseball’s offseason. Many said “no.” Cord-cutters either found legally dubious ways to stream their teams or didn’t miss sports. With Sinclair’s Bally Sports channels in crisis, RSN owners are scrambling to recover by offering their own streaming packages.
Pro sports are changing quickly, and the future of the regional sports network is bleak as more teams will end run cable providers. As Dallas Mavericks owner and media visionary Mark Cuban once warned his peers, “pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.” The RSN is headed for the butcher.
