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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The theory is that enough people will be convinced to go to the game that it’s a net positive.
They want you to watch on the home network. Like the over the air channel or whatever your local channel is. They get first rights to viewing. If you are outside those areas, they will allow you to watch on a 3rd party app that had those rights.
Get a VPN to bypass some of these restrictions when it comes to streaming location. I used to do that with MLB.tv.
AFAIK they do that kinda thing so they can sell services like “NFL Sunday Ticket” and “Redzone” as like a premium item. So for games that are not nationally televised (I.e. all prime time games plus a few others), you have access to each game based on your local cable stations and what they air each week. It’s much more commonly an issue for people who are a fan of a team that’s located in a different area. I agree that its stupid though, especially if it’s the team that’s closest to you geographically- that just seems pretty odd and sh*tty for no reason🤷🏻♂️
It’s about the broadcast rights. For example in Canada, the Raptors and the Maple Leafs are both owned by Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment. MLSE is partially owned by the two major television providers Bell and Rogers. Consequently, all Raptors games and Leafs games are broadcast on either TSN (owned by Rogers) or Sportsnet (owned by Bell) and if you have NBA League Pass or NHL Center Ice, you can’t watch either teams games live on that service in Canada because the legacies don’t have the broadcast rights.
My understanding is that it is similar in the US, except that it is not nationwide broadcast rights, but local markets. Local broadcasters will generally have a ‘market area’ considered local to the game and they have the broadcast rights in that region. It doesn’t mean the game is not available to you at all, but you need the right service to watch it, because League Pass/Center Ice will have a blackout in your area.
You might be 5.5 hours away – but is the station broadcasting the game local to you or the team? You would think you would have a station out of the football market you could pick up?
Maybe I’m just confused and they don’t broadcast the game at all now? I’m not huge into sports – but I live within 5.5 hours of 5 NFL teams and if you picked up a different markets station you could bypass the blackout.
The purpose though – they want to sell tickets to the stadium than people watch for free. You just seem to be an edge case of bad luck.
Today we can make personalized ads on a broadcast, but it wasn’t like that in the past. Since sports team have very localized fans, it’s really hard to sell nation wide ads on those games. Not impossible, and it’s easier to do for certain teams of certain sports, but for the majority of the teams, they get more money by selling local ads.
For that reason, the highest bidder for the rights of games are broadcast company that will sell local ads and make sure to broadcast only in that local region. If someone else offer another broadcast, that would be less viewership for the broadcaster, which limit the amount of ads they can sell, and limit the amount of money they get. So when they sign a contract with a team, they ask for a blackout so that their view can’t see the game from someone else. (for example the broadcaster of the other team).
But today this is an old system. Today we can easily make a broadcast with personalize and localize ads. The problem is that most of these contract are several years old and even if the idea of a new type of broadcast is easy to come up with, changing the views of everybody involved and implementing is harder to do.
It will happen, but we are not there yet.
Previously there were less TV stations (and internet streaming didn’t exist), so to try to drive people to the stadium, the TV contracts were written to prevent TV viewing of the game if you were “close enough to the stadium”.
and to make this more complex, many different teams have their own TV channels distribution contracts (baseball has lots of this).
The sports teams and leagues have not caught up with this simple fact: Blackouts do not drive people to the stadium. If people cannot watch the game on TV, there are about a million other entertainment options available, and if the teams want to add friction that prevents me from watching the game, I’ll watch something else.
Since others have answered the question I just want to highlight how ridiculous this can get. The entire state of Iowa is blacked out of viewing 6 teams on MLB’s streaming service (Cubs, White Sox, Royals, Twins, Brewers, and Cardinals). This means the games of up to 12 teams could be blacked out, 40% of the league.
Also, where I live in California is blacked out from Dodgers and Angels games, despite being over 200 miles from either. There were a few years about a decade ago where the Dodgers were renegotiating their TV deal and the games could not be viewed on any channel, no matter what cable package or streaming platform you had access to. I remember going to sports bars to try to watch Giants v Dodgers games with friends and they couldn’t even get the games.
I moved to a new area a few years ago with an NFL team. The team sucked, so they never sold out the games. Therefore they always had a tv blackout. I never became a fan because I couldn’t watch the games. I never bought a jersey, never bought a cap, nothing. I could’ve been a fan, but no.
Meanwhile, the baseball team was okay (and on tv) at the time so I followed them and went to quite a few games.
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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