This is what you’ve all been waiting for, the Comcast/Xfinity deal with Marquee Sports Network. Recently, on 670-The Score, Chicago Cubs president, Crane Kenney, confirmed that a deal is likely to happen before the season starts.
Cub business President Crane Kenney said he is very confident a deal with Comcast for Marquee channel agreement will take place as soon as baseball returns. He said an agreement was very close before baseball suspended play March 12th.
— Bruce Levine (@MLBBruceLevine) May 15, 2020
What is interesting is, and as I suggested back in February, a deal was close before play was suspended. Now, with a couple months of quarantine under our belts, and the revised season about to get underway, it is inevitable that the deal is finalized.
This is an appropriate time for this to happen, while most of Chicagoland will be awaiting the turn to Phase 3 and 4 of Governor Pritzker’s reopening plan, the expectation is there will still be thousands of Illinoisans that are at home channel surfing through the end of July. Adding another channel will provide multiple hours of additional entertainment, but more importantly to these organizations, a return on both Comcast’s and Marquee’s investment.
There was also mention that the Cubs are still talking with Dish Network, however, Dish’s stance on regional sports still makes this a long shot to get done. Personally, and take this with a grain of salt, I do not see Marquee landing on Dish for at least the first two seasons. Dish is not interested in subsidizing sports and Marquee is urging carriers to not charge additionally for their network (however, different carriers may only offer RSN’s in specific regional sports packages, which could result in additional fees above regular cable packages).
Perhaps the more probable additional network to come into the fold will be YouTube TV. There is still a lot of optimism surrounding the addition of YouTube TV, even though talks between Sinclair Broadcasting (parent of Marquee) and YouTube had an ugly negotiation in February and March. Since then, the two sides have kissed and made up, but it was at the expense of the YES Network and another RSN. The YES Network likely will not be in the fold as YouTube broadcasts games, since the Yankees took a pretty hard-line stance suggesting that they will not allow their games to be broadcasted as a free, “Game of the Week” on their platform.
The Cubs, on the other hand, have had a solid relationship with the folks at YouTube. The brilliant team on the creative side with the Cubs has created a solid channel on the platform, which has nearly 160k subscribers and 18 million video views. This is 70k more subscribers than the Yankees have. The Cubs boast more subscribers than any other baseball team on the platform and the second-most views of any MLB team.
Basically, the Cubs understand the importance of the platform (there were baseball teams with less than 8,000 subscribers) and they will make necessary moves, now that there is an agreement between Sinclair and YouTube, to ensure their network is on the platform.
