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“While viewing habits continue to shift, it’s clear that regular season professional sports programming remains extremely popular with a core base of traditional cable, satellite, and OTT customers,” said Dan Finnerty, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Spectrum Networks. (As part of that, too, Charter is reportedly looking to launch an over-the-top streaming option for consumers to be able to get those networks directly, following in the footsteps of Bally Sports+, NESN 360, MSG+, YES’ DTC service, and more.) Here are a couple quotes on that from a DirecTV/Charter release: The new threshold isn’t specified, but this will mean that there are more DirecTV packages without those channels. But Charter recently signed an extension for both networks with DirecTV (also including U-verse and DirecTV Stream), and that comes with a much lower distribution threshold than what they had (estimated at 80 to 90 percent of overall subscribers). They own Spectrum SportsNet (Lakers) and SportsNet LA (Dodgers), with the latter channel notable for plenty of carriage disputes in the past.
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If they are able to bring that network (which is 77 percent owned by the Baltimore Orioles, 23 percent owned by the Washington Nationals, and the subject of an extremely long-running legal fight between those sides) back at some point, it will be interesting to see if it’s placed in Spectrum Select Plus or not.Īnother significant part of this piece is that Charter is also applying some of this flexibility to the RSNs they own, including when it comes to other distributors’ carriage of those networks. Charter dropped MASN overall at the start of this season.

The remaining ones have deals that come up over the next 14 months or so.Īs Ourand notes, the only RSN Charter hasn’t been able to get on board so far is MASN. As Charter has renewed its RSN deals, it began lowering those guarantees, which has given Charter the flexibility to create a lower-cost tier without them.Ĭharter has renewed almost all of its RSN deals, affecting 85% of its footprint.
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It’s taken several years and many torturous negotiations, but Charter executives have been changing those contracts to get more flexibility on how to sell RSNs to their customers.Īs little as a decade ago, RSN contracts required that they reach 85%-90% of a distributor’s customer base. But the RSNs all had deals that required they stay on the most popular tiers. RSNs, for example, regularly boast the biggest viewership numbers in any market for their live games. Sports tiers have never been popular, especially since they didn’t include any of the most popular sports channels.
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This will have Spectrum (beginning in the third quarter of 2023) divide its expanded basic Spectrum TV Select into two packages: Spectrum Select Plus will include RSNs and league networks, while Spectrum Select Signature will not, and will likely be around $10 a month cheaper (at least to start). 2 cable provider Charter (which operates Spectrum) has now come to an agreement with many RSNs and league networks to offer them in a higher tier. John Ourand of Sports Business Journal published a fascinating piece Monday on how U.S. With that in mind, it’s interesting to see a wildly-different tier strategy being tested out. And for the networks that do make the basic tiers, they sometimes wind up in carriage disputes centered around the tier, which can lead to them not being carried at all. For the sports networks that aren’t able to get into those basic tiers and wind up in higher tiers or sports add-on packages, they wind up with fewer subscribers (and thus, lower per-subscriber fee revenue) than if the tiers they’re in had other compelling sports content. having a lot of sports channels (especially regional sports networks) in more basic tiers means they have to charge consumers more for those tiers to recoup their per-subscriber fee costs, and that can exacerbate cord-cutting from people opting to ditch MVPDs entirely. Unsurprisingly, most networks have often pushed to be in as broad a tier as possible, and in sports, many of them have had great success.īut that strategy poses some challenges of its own for all sides. The sides agreeing on a per-subscriber carriage fee is one thing, but that fee produces drastically different revenue if the network is in most subscribers’ packages or if it’s only a higher-tier add-on. One of the more notable parts of networks’ carriage negotiations with multichannel video providers (cable, satellite, or virtual) is about the tier those MVPDs can place the networks in.
