NEWSLETTER
Major Chicago media news. Or, that is to say, it would be if it actually happens.
Thanks to ongoing disputes with one of the major cable providers in the country, together with the tentacles of related entities, there is a chance that Marquee Sports Network could merge with the newly-created Chicago Sports Network (the successor to NBC Sports Chicago):
The carriage struggles for the new CHSN entity have been discussed at length around here, but what I didn’t realize until now is that the potential carriage dispute between Comcast (Xfinity) and Marquee didn’t actually result in a new deal back in September – only an extension of the old deal while negotiations continued. That’s not ideal.
So you’ve got Sinclair, which owns a minority stake in Marquee in a joint venture with the Cubs, and which handles a lot of the carriage work, negotiating with Comcast about a longer deal. And then you’ve also got Sinclair negotiating with Comcast about deals for its other stations. Combine that with CHSN’s inability to get full carriage, and you have a recipe for a larger combination that could make some sense. Hence the report from Puck’s John Ourand.
For now, this would seem to be almost entirely about preserving cable carriage deals – at preferred customer tiers and fee levels – for all of Marquee, CHSN, and Sinclair, rather than being about any kind of optimized setup for the long-term future. In other words, the point would simply be about protect against future carriage disputes, as Comcast’s customer base of cable subscribers dwindles. There is no “riding out the storm” of cord-cutting. There is merely getting as many dollars as you can along the path of transitioning to a more streaming-focused approach.
It is too early to speculate on things like what this would look like for consumers – are we talking one combined channel? One combined network but with multiple channels? One streaming service? Or just a sister company relationship purely for leverage? – but I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn if I say the BEST outcome for customers would be as much of a combination as possible. A true one-stop shop for as many of Chicago’s pro teams as possible? Yeah, that’d be the dream for us fans.
But if that’s not the best way to extract maximum dollars in the dying cable world or the dawning streaming world, then that will not be the approach. I’ll leave that at TBD.
As for how this could impact the Chicago Cubs, specifically, I don’t know that it would necessarily create any new revenue opportunities, but it might help protect against further TV-related erosion. Because the Cubs probably have the most valuable TV asset in the group of non-NFL Chicago sports teams (not just because of the team’s large fan base, but also because of the volume of game inventory), they and Marquee might be the best situated in these negotiations to slightly advantage themselves? That’s just speculation, though, and I’m not even going to pretend I know what exactly that might look like. It just hits me in the gut that a combined Chicago sports entity probably winds up a good thing for the Cubs in the long run, assuming they are able to take advantage of their unique value in the process.
All that said, the potential consumer impacts are at least as important to me – and to you non-Cubs fans following along – so that’s the part I’ll be watching most closely in the months/years ahead.
