HEY! Good news! Major League Baseball may soon let you stream local games– something that’s great for many fans… except those in Philadelphia (and some other cities), because, as predicted, Comcast will still F you.

From the Sports Business Journal:

Local streaming is coming to many Major League Baseball markets next season, thanks to a breakthrough in the league’s long-running negotiations with Fox Sports.

Several industry sources said the league is drafting deal documents with Fox, which holds the local media rights to 15 MLB teams. An agreement to offer authenticated local streaming of live games is expected to be in place by the start of the 2016 season.

Under the proposed deal, local games could be streamed on FOX websites and apps, not MLB.tv, but the regional FOX networks would have to use MLB.tv as the back-end host of the stream (a good thing). It probably won’t help with cord-cutting because, it seems, you’d still need to be a regional subscriber of a local FOX Sports Network – a cable subscriber – but at least it would be much easier to watch games if you live in those FOX markets.

Of course, the Phillies are on NBC-owned Comcast SportsNet:

Comcast, which holds the rights to six MLB teams, is less inclined to use [MLB.tv] because it already has a division that streams sports programming that is generally regarded as high quality — such as the Olympics streams for NBC and local NBA streams for its RSNs.

 


Nailed it. Here’s what I wrote in April:

But if Major League Baseball is able to strike a deal with regional networks like FOX and CSN, expect the other leagues to follow suit. But why do I get the feeling that NBC-CSN is going to be the company that holds all this up?

Even for FOX subscribers, however, this is still a bit of a clusterfuck. 10 years from now we’re going to look back on this cord-cutting thing the same way we look back on pre-iTunes music or pre-Twitter media. It just makes so much sense that you should be able to watch games on computer, phone or tablet, without a cable subscription. But competing business interests – often on Comcast’s part – are fighting to prevent it. I’ll say it again: it’s NOT a cost-cutting thing for consumers – we’re eventually going to pay about the same for broadband and all our subscriptions (maybe you save a little bit in the short-term) – but it’s a convenience thing. There’s simply no reason* why I shouldn’t be able to go sit out back, drink a beer, and watch the Phillies on my phone tonight. None. I pay for both Comcast and MLB.tv.

Anyway, this is one small step for FOX cities, one giant middle finger for CSN cities.

*Except for the fact that they’re not playing.