Marquee Sports is Coming Feb 22nd – Will YOU Have It? Confirm Here

Most of us remember getting home from school around 3:30 and turning on Channel 9 to catch the end of the Cubs game. With Harry Carey and Steve Stone explaining the action while finishing my math homework, that is how I became a diehard Chicago Cubs fan.

As the years passed, WGN gave some games away to CSN and WCIU and then ABC. In the most recent years, it became difficult and confusing to even find what channel the Cubs were on and you’d miss first pitch by the time you found them. In these last four or five years, the Cubs have been prepping its fanbase for what we longed for – a single place to find all Cubs games.

Enter Marquee Sports Network.

Marquee will be the home to at least 145 Cubs games this summer (ESPN, FOX, and MLB Network will likely host the rest) and it will unite the plethora of channels back into one sole provider of Cubs broadcasts. But, just like the old adage, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

That is what it is beginning to feel like with Marquee and the lack of carriage deals thus far.

Here are the providers that we know Marquee has deals in place with so far:

• AT&T TV Now
• AT&T U-Verse
• DirecTV
• RCN
• TVision
• MetroNet
• FiOS TV from Frontier
• Mediacom
• Mahaska Communications
• Charter Communications

So, thus far, Marquee has only really negotiated carriage packages with AT&T (who owns DirecTV), RCN, and TVision. RCN doesn’t cover the entire Chicagoland market (it only really covers Chicago as far north as Evanston) and TVision (a T-Mobile product) will run you $100 a month.

Here are the providers that currently do not carry Marquee:

• Amazon TV
• Dish Network
• fuboTV
• Hulu Live TV
• Playstation Vue
• Roku
• Sling TV
• Vidgo
• WOW
• Xfinity/Comcast
• YouTube TV
• ACMA Communications
• Inside Connect
• Spectrum
• Consolidated Communications
• NewWave
• ClearVision
• Wabash Independent Networks
• ImOn Communications
• South Slope Cooperative
• USA Communications
• Goldfield Comm Srvs
• Lehigh Services Inc
• Webster-Calhoun Coop
• Griswold Coop
• Long Lines Cable
• Premier Communications
• Wes Tel Systems
• Spectrum

The biggest player in the group is Xfinity. Comcast/Xfinity has far and away the most subscribers throughout the Illinois-Iowa-Indiana viewing area. Something to note, the New York Yankees with their Yes Network had a dispute in 2016 on carriage fees. The dispute wasn’t resolved until 2017 and nearly a million people were unable to watch Yankees games within the northern New Jersey and parts of Connecticut and Pennsylvania area.

Similarly, Comcast has roughly 1.5 million subscribers in the Chicagoland viewing area. Something will very likely work out, but it is when that is the question.

With less than two weeks before the official launch of Marquee, it does not look like Xfinity/Comcast will have the channel at launch. While Cubs fans might be upset over missing the first baseball of the season, even if it is just Spring Training, if there was even an inkling of hope that they will have it come March 26th it will likely save a migration to AT&T products (or another active provider). Ultimately, something will get worked out between the two. While Comcast will have NBC Sports, which covers the Chicago White Sox, Blackhawks, and Bulls, the Cubs have been the biggest draw on NBC Sports for a number of years.

What’s more, Marquee, or Sinclair rather, will continue to use their 191 channel lineup as leverage against Comcast in an effort to broker a deal. They used this tactic when they purchased Fox’s equity stake in the Yes Network knowing Fox News was up for renewal. When talking with AT&T, they leveraged their 191 channel lineup to ensure they were quick to jump on (which, AT&T wasn’t in a position to NOT comply as they lost around 4 million subscribers over 2019).

There is a lot less optimism when it comes to Dish Network. In an article from FierceVideo, Sinclair and Dish have been trading blows with one another since July and there seems to be no end in sight.

Dish Network has not carried 21 Fox Sports RSNs since July. In the time between then and the third-quarter earnings season, Sinclair closed its $10.6 billion deal for those networks, which were divested as part of Disney’s $71.3 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox. Sinclair bought the RSNs through a new indirect subsidiary named Diamond Sports. Sinclair also bought a stake in YES Network, the television home of the New York Yankees and other teams, and next year will launch a new RSN in partnership with the Chicago Cubs.

During Sinclair’s earning’s call in November, CEO Chris Ripley held no punches.

“We view it as a temporary issue. Either we come to a deal with Dish or their relevance in the industry will be reduced over time,” Ripley said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. He argued that Dish forgoing Sinclair’s RSNs is the equivalent, from a viewership perspective, of forgoing the top 10 entertainment programs combined. “So, it’s really forgoing a key piece of the bundle, and that’s only going to be exasperated over time as sports betting moves through the country and sparks even greater interest and engagement with our content.”

For Marquee, the Cubs, and Sinclair – the goal is to be able to supply Cubs games to every able customer they can. With rumors that Sinclair is selling Marquee at $4 per subscriber, down from the reported $6 or more late-2019, this doesn’t represent a major financial investment if the provider were to pass it along to subscribers. The issue however is, RSN’s are often pushed to all local subscribers and in the case of the Yes Network, only about 10% of Comcast’s customers watched more the 15% of available Yankees games.

Dish chairman Charlie Ergan had mentioned that they attribute a loss of subscribers to not having RSN’s during August and September, the two months in which viewership on RSN’s increase, but it provided Dish with savings in operational costs. Even with a reduction in costs, as Ergan said, “we’d rather have a deal.”

We are now entering the eighth month in which Dish has not offered an RSN, and all accounts suggest when Sinclair approached Dish about Marquee the answer was a bold and swift “No!” Rich Greenfield, media analyst at Lightshed Partners suggests there is a price point in which Dish would consider bringing RSN’s back to Dish and Sling, but right now Sinclair doesn’t appear to be close to that price. Ergan has the belief that sports fans will eventually just find other means to watch games, like streaming services.

The problem with that, when it comes to baseball, local fans are blacked out from any “legal” stream of the game. MLB At Bat will not allow viewing of a Cubs game within their local televised area through the use of Geofencing and users are then forced to find unscrupulous ways to stream those games.

Currently, the best way to ensure you will have Marquee Sports Network is for you to either have AT&T services (or one of the other several providers) or continuously call your providers, email your providers, and use Social Media to remind your providers that you demand them to carry Marquee Sports Network. Also note, when you call the customer service rep, all they have access to is their current channel lineup. Don’t harass them by asking when the channel is live or where they’re at in negotiations. Even if your provider will carry the network, it is unlikely that they have much more knowledge about the channel, start dates, or potential costs.

If you want to find out if you will have the network, or want to find which providers will carry Marquee at launch, visit www.getmarqueesportsnetwork.com