Shortly after MLB’s Opening Day Thursday, Yankees’ and Cubs’ fans who have Comcast’s Xfinity service may lose access to their teams’ games.
The second-largest multichannel video programming distributor in the U.S. is in overall negotiations with Sinclair Broadcast Group, with a deadline of midnight Friday. And Alex Sherman noted in his CNBC Sport newsletter Thursday that there looks to be a significant possibility of one or both of those regional sports networks, especially YES, going dark on Xfinity. Here’s more from that piece:
“Comcast subscribers who are Cubs and Yankees fans may be in for a rude awakening. Both the YES Network and Marquee Sports Network are in danger of losing carriage at midnight Friday, although sources say at least a deal with Marquee is likely to happen. Sinclair Broadcast Group handles the distribution for both networks, and Comcast’s deal with Sinclair is up.
“Comcast has been aggressively tiering RSNs, removing them from the standard cable bundle. YES Network isn’t too keen on this idea, noting that SNY (the Mets RSN, of which Comcast is a part owner) remains available on basic cable. Of course, YES is available direct-to-consumer, and SNY isn’t.
“It’s possible that Comcast reaches a deal with all of Sinclair Broadcast Group, including Marquee, but not YES Network.”
The possibility of a Comcast-YES dispute has been raised before, with New York governor Kathy Hochul even urging the sides to reach an agreement in a release Monday. But the Friday deadline is new; Hochul’s release noted that the previous extension between the sides would expire Tuesday, and Sportico’s Anthony Crupi wrote Tuesday another extension would expire at midnight Wednesday. Some level of further agreement must have been struck in the interim, as YES remains on Comcast systems for the moment, but Sherman’s commentary in that newsletter is notable for citing the Friday deadline, mentioning that this could impact Marquee and other Sinclair networks as well, and raising the possibility of Sinclair striking a deal that doesn’t include YES.
How might that happen? Well, while Sinclair handles YES’ distribution, they don’t actually have a high ownership stake there, unlike Marquee (a 50-50 joint venture with the Cubs). The Yankees and Nets launched YES in 2002 after a protracted legal dispute with Cablevision and MSG, with the YankeeNets company (now YankeeGlobal Enterprises, and mostly just the parent of the Yankees) holding a 60 percent stake in the channel to 40 percent from other investors. Then-Fox parent NewsCorp bought a 49 percent stake in YES in 2007 and incorporated it into their Fox RSN (now FanDuel RSN) family. But the Yankees and others wound up buying that stake back from Disney (which had acquired it in the larger Disney-Fox deal) in 2019.
That left the current situation, where the Yankees own 26.5 percent of YES, Main Street Sports has 20 percent, Amazon has 15 percent, and other investors have the rest. And the Main Street Sports stake is worth particular discussion. That’s the company previously known as Diamond Sports, which started as a separate company Sinclair and Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group created to buy the ex-Fox RSNs from Disney, but which is now mostly creditor-owned following its 2023-25 bankruptcy. So while Sinclair still represents YES in distribution negotiations, they don’t have a significant equity stake, and that could lead to a Comcast-Sinclair deal that doesn’t include YES (which has some further unique elements to its situation beyond just ownership, including the popularity of the Yankees and the side deal they have for Amazon-exclusive games).
The overall Comcast push to force RSNs to a higher Xfinity tier is notable as well, as that’s been a key factor in many recent RSN carriage disputes. Significantly, after years of criticism for taking that approach with competitors’ RSNs and not their own, Comcast bumped some of their own NBC Sports Regional Networks (NBC Sports Bay Area, NBC Sports California, and NBC Sports Boston) to a higher tier earlier this year. But they haven’t yet done that with SNY or with NBC Sports Philadelphia, both of which are in the middle of multi-year deals.
If a Sinclair-Comcast deal isn’t struck, that could have major impacts for both companies, and for Xfinity subscribers. Comcast had 12.8 million Xfinity subscribers at the end of Q3 last year, the second-largest MVPD number behind only Charter’s Spectrum and its 13 million. Losing rights to popular local teams like the Yankees and Cubs could see a lot of people switch away from their service, to say nothing of those upset at the loss of other Sinclair content (including Tennis Channel, and particularly, the second-highest number of local network affiliates in the country).
However, Crupi notes that the last Comcast-YES dispute, which saw YES off Comcast systems in much of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania from November 2015-March 2017, “did not have an outsized impact on Comcast’s day-to-day operations.” Their overall scale remains significant, and extends well beyond this market. And a carriage dispute would also be a blow to Sinclair, which would lose a lot of per-subscriber revenue and potentially ad dollars as well without a Comcast deal.
There is some hope this gets resolved without a blackout. There have already been extensions here, which is always promising, and represents that the sides are seemingly still negotiating. And while Comcast has been aggressive in moving RSNs to higher tiers, and has gotten into some notable and long carriage disputes with RSNs, they have struck a number of recent deals to keep or add these networks in some fashion. A significant exception there is the Bulls/Blackhawks/White Sox’s Chicago Sports Network, though, and that’s seen some talk of a potential merger between that network and Marquee, which could add to the complications here.
At any rate, both YES and Marquee have direct-to-consumer offerings, so those are potential ways for Comcast subscribers to still get games if a blackout winds up happening here. But the extra cost and inconvenience to buy a separate subscription for something that was previously in a cable package certainly might alienate many. And if this carriage dispute does indeed go hot, that’s going to have notable impacts on Comcast, Sinclair, these networks, and fans.