The market for sports skinny bundles has shifted, given recent news that Venu Sports is not moving forward, Disney is investing into Fubo, and DirecTV will be offering a grouping of sports channels called MySports, which was announced on Tuesday.
DirecTV’s new bundle offers a wide range of nationally available broadcast and cable channels from Disney, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal as well as FAST sports networks and channels operated by major leagues and college conferences. However, one thing noticeably missing from MySports is access to regional sports networks, which carry the bulk of local broadcasts for pro teams as well as colleges and prep programs not often shown on national television.
Jon Greer, DirecTV’s head of communications and community, said that the RSNs will be available as add-ons to MySports subscriptions later in the year.
“You have the casual sports fan who wants all these national networks and some local football and whatever else is on broadcast,” Greer said in a phone interview. “And then you have the next tier that wants the RSNs. We will make an add-on option available for that next tier who wants to pay a little bit more for RSNs to be able to access it through MySports without having to be saddled with all the entertainment content.”
Over the past two years, several pro sports teams have abandoned RSNs entirely during the Diamond Sports Group (now Main Street Sports Group) bankruptcy proceedings. Some teams have moved their games to over-the-air options with local stations such as Gray, Scripps, Tegna and other affiliate owners. Greer said while MySports only includes ABC, Fox and NBC affiliates, those station groups could bring themselves into MySports in the future.
“We looked at the list of owned and operated stations across those three programmers in the 24 markets,” Greer said. “Five of the markets have all three of those local broadcast stations. As we fill in the station groups, we’ll look and ask if we have enough market size here for locals to actually activate the whole market.”
To that point, carriage disputes are a problem for not just national carriers; the New York and Chicago metropolitan areas are dealing with major blackouts of MSG Networks and CHSN, respectively. At the halfway point for the NBA and NHL seasons, a large segment of fans between the No. 1 and No. 3 media markets in the country are unable to watch their teams unless they are playing on national TV.
Greer said that DirecTV had been discussing the very same package with Disney, Fox and WBD (as well as other live sports holders) long before they announced plans for the now-shuttered joint venture. Moreover, he said that the bundle would have been offered in Q1 2025, regardless of the legal proceedings against Venu.
Yet the animosity between DirecTV and Disney spilled further into public view during a two-week blackout of the Disney’s networks at the start of football season in September. So how did the satcaster end up partnering with the same entities it had sued?
“If Disney had chosen to be quiet about it and allow us to just work with them to reach a new agreement without pulling the content, that would have been our option,” Greer said. “And so that’s exactly what we did with the other programmers over the back half of last year, and customers never knew that there was a dispute even on the horizon because we worked with them.”
For DirecTV, MySports appears to be a step in the right direction, one made even more important as nearly every cable and satellite operator fights for survival against the unending tide of cord-cutting.
Through the end of Q3 2024, DirecTV and Dish are down to 12.59 million subscribers, versus 31.63 million for cable operators. Total bundled pay-TV subscribers (minus the virtual multi-video distributors, such as DirecTV Stream) is now 48.18 million.
Satellite has lost 4.77 million customers in the past two years, down 27% versus 17.36 million at the end of Q3 2022. In the same period, cable operators lost 7.91 million subs, down 20%. Cable operators still have more runway when it comes to the customer drain as their penetration is at 25% of all U.S. TV households versus just 10% for DirecTV/Dish.
DirecTV abandoned its plans to acquire Dish in November after Dish bondholders rejected the debt-exchange offer that would have made the Echostar-owned company take a $1.5 billion haircut.
With additional reporting from Anthony Crupi.
