I’m 5.5 hours away from the closest team and any home game gets blocked. What’s the point of that? Not only is there 0 chance I’m driving there and back for a game but now I’m not even interested in watching the game or buying gear. Care to explain?
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Teams make deals with regional sports networks to be shown on TV. The leagues have an agreement with the regional sports networks to blackout games within team X’s area. The idea is also to drive fans to the stadium.
Example, I live in the LA area, I can watch the Seattle Mariners if I had MLB.tv but could not watch the Angels or Dodgers via MLB.tv, I would need cable/satellite or MLB.tv and a VPN. I could watch the kind of close by San Diego Padres since there is a certain point where the Angels/Dodgers/Padres broadcast zone runs into one another.
Saying you are 5.5 hours from the nearest team, you are in that teams broadcast area because there is nothing else closer, all of the broadcast zones run into to something eventually. In the midwest and some of the south, there is so much distance between teams, it sometimes cause really large broadcast zones.
The same is true with the NBA and NHL. The NHL runs their streaming now, or at least has a partnership with ESPN+, local games are still blacked out.
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