The Ilitch family first floated the idea of launching their own regional sports network back in 2018, when the RSN business still looked like a viable long-term model. At the time, it was mostly a negotiating position. On Monday, with the regional sports network industry actively collapsing around them, they actually did it.
Ilitch Sports + Entertainment announced the launch of Detroit SportsNet, a platform powered by MLB Media that will carry Tigers games starting this season and Red Wings games beginning in 2026-27. The announcement was the formal extension of a partnership the Ilitches announced last month with MLB, which made Detroit the seventh former Main Street team to join MLB’s production umbrella for 2026. The difference between Detroit and the other six is that the Ilitches own both clubs, giving them a year-round programming footprint to justify putting their name on the thing rather than quietly folding into the league’s generic product.
When Main Street Sports Group missed its February payment obligations, all nine MLB clubs still under contract — Detroit included — terminated their deals and began figuring out what came next. Six teams moved quickly under the league’s production umbrella. The Ilitches held off, which made sense given that they had two clubs to plan for rather than one. The Red Wings will finish out this season on FanDuel Sports Network — Main Street remains contractually obligated to carry NHL games through April — and then transition to DSN for 2026-27.
The Tigers enter this new era with real audience momentum. Through the first week of July last season, local viewership had more than doubled year-over-year — the largest RSN viewership increase in MLB — according to Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal. Whether Detroit SportsNet can hold onto that audience through the disruption of a network launch, with cable distribution still unsettled, remains to be seen. But the alternative — waiting for Main Street Sports to collapse entirely around them — wasn’t much of a plan either.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.