RSNs Are Crumbling—Now What? The New Playbook for Local Sports

Local sports is entering its most chaotic—and consequential—era yet.

In Episode 8 of In the Vicinity, local media veteran Tim Hanlon is joined by a guest this week, Anthony Campanella, VP, Inventory Partnerships & Operations, Madhive. The duo unpack the unraveling of the RSN model and the messy transition that’s replacing it.

As leagues like Major League Baseball rethink distribution, broadcasters scramble to fill gaps, and streaming platforms carve up rights, one thing is clear: the old playbook is gone—and no one’s quite sure what the new one looks like yet.

Listen to the full In the Vicinity podcast above or get it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Tim Hanlon: Hello there. You are In the Vicinity. Welcome. My name is Tim Hanlon. I am the founder and the CEO of The Vertere Group here in Chicago, where we help consultatively advise various firms in the media and technology spaces as we try to figure out what the hell is going on in this crazy, changing media world.

This is our little weekly sojourn into what's going on in the world of the local realm of media, all different points and expressions thereof. Usually I am joined by the CEO of Madhive. His name is Jim Wilson. But Jim's taken a week off, and we're getting into the realm of sports with Madhive VP of Inventory, Partnerships, and Operations, Anthony Campanella.

And Anthony is the king of all things sports at Madhive. It only makes sense that he joins me in these upcoming conversations. We kinda deep dive into the strangeness of what's going on with local sports, the disintegration, if you will, of the regional sports network model, not completely, but certainly mostly, how local stations in the TV realm, local broadcast TV stations are in some cases stepping up to fill in some of those gaps, direct-to-consumer streaming replacing some of those RSN subscriptions with other subscriptions, if you will, with streaming first in mind.

We get into all those kinds of dynamics and maybe make a few prognostications. This is probably gonna be the first of a number of different episodes devoted to this intersection between local media and sports. But let's get our first one underway, shall we? Here's me and Anthony. Please, as always, enjoy.

All right, Anthony, thanks for joining us this week. Jim is busy I guess doing other things and we wanna get into the realm of sports. And at Madhive, we understand that you are the sports king. And look, I think a lot of our previous conversations have revolved around local television, whether it be broadcast or the regional sports network configuration, et cetera, being very much entwined with sports, certainly historically.

And I would argue now with the advent of the regional sports networks over the last 20-plus years or so it's become a money machine for all these local rights and these teams to basically afford keeping up with the Joneses with all the talent that they need and all that kind of stuff.

Yet, as we record this, the very first day of May or so, and a couple of days afterwards we'll drop this, the very future of the regional sports network model is fast crumbling if not maybe on its way out. From your perspective, both professionally and maybe even as a fan, what's your take on what's going on right now with local sports rights?

Just seems like it's a whole uncharted territory going in the next couple of months and years. 

Anthony Campanella: Yeah. And Tim, thanks again for having me. I appreciate being on and thanks for calling me the Sports King. I'm definitely working on earning that title here at Madhive, that's for sure.

Tim Hanlon: Okay, take your crown off while we continue this conversation.

Anthony Campanella: Yeah at least for the time being I'll take it off. It gets a little bit itchy sometimes. But yeah, no the reality is that we're seeing this at scale right now, and I know that a lot of these rights are being lost. I think the biggest surprise for the MLB season even to kick off is FanDuel Sports no longer having Major League Baseball.

We see the MLB with MLB.tv is now giving distribution rights to ESPN for in-market games, and we're seeing the streamers continuously invest larger dollar amounts, which in turn are gonna make it very hard for the leagues to say no to, right? And that money is driving these conversations and decisions more than anything else.

The reality is, though, is that sports have always been local first. It's always been the local crowd, be it with college football, your local pro sports team, even college baseball. Heck, even with high school sports, we see folks like Spectrum pushing out high school sports and getting this local broadcast out to the fans that are in market.

And that familiarity and that passion that local brings is slowly going to be dissipating with this, and I think a lot of the broadcasters are feeling it. And to pivot around it is they are working with partners similar to Madhive to access these streaming live sports where they are at now. And as they lose the rights, they're now trying to still sell it, package it, and get access to it through programmatic marketplaces at a local level.

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, look, back in the day even before the advent of cable the idea of local broadcasters carrying games, WGN in Chicago and WPIX with the Yankees games in New York, and the Mets games on WOR and Channel 9 in New York. Local television has always been part of the baseball front, and even around the edges with the winter sports too.

And then the advent of the regional sports network when cable came along and took that to a whole another level and certainly a very profitable one because it was either included in one's cable package or more egregiously as a fan or more economically viable if you're a team owner where you paid extra in your cable package for it, not unlike HBO or whatever.

But now we sit at the very precipice of that sort of era going away. The collapse of mainstream sports and its torturous history over the last couple years and, in some cases, in some markets some regional sports networks are still doing pretty well for different reasons, but the vast majority of them are much more under duress.

And I think what's happening is in the middle, between the broadcasters who are still around, by the way, and these RSNs which are dissipating, is a vacuum. And I think this vacuum is largely being addressed by two aspects that are floating around out there. One is the local broadcasters saying, "Hey, wait a minute. We're still here. We've always been here. Maybe we can sop up some of this inventory. Certainly not along the lines of the same economics of an RSN, but at least in the interim until this all gets figured out again, we should at least be in the business of helping you as teams get some reach," right?

And on the other front is streaming which is this direct-to-consumer kind of endeavor, right? Some RSNs are building out their own streaming thing so that when you subscribe, you either subscribe through cable or you can subscribe directly with the stream, but you're still paying $10, $20, $30 a month or whatever to get it.

So I guess the question I'll have for you in this is, what do you see from your perspective at Madhive looking across the country and dealing with advertisers who still wanna reach these sports audiences when these two kinds of things are kinda trying to step up and inelegantly, I don't know, backstop what is now dissipating, which is this RSN thing, this broadcast TV and this direct-to-consumer streaming thing?

Anthony Campanella: That's a great question, and I think what we're seeing is also a shift in strategy just in general, right? So when you look at the local broadcasters, maybe they've been used to selling – say I'm in Atlanta, and I'm a big TV station, a local TV station in Atlanta. I only wanna run on in-market Braves games, right?

And maybe I only have so much inventory available that I have the right to sell for that. So when I go out and I'm going to a local HVAC company or local law firm that wants to run on the Braves only, I can only sell so much to it, and then maybe they want more. So how do I now package both my local broadcasting rights along with the streaming that's gonna be, yeah, within a specific DMA, but I can't necessarily guarantee a Braves game, right?

So now I have to have a different type of message. I have to have a different type of pricing strategy, and I have to have a different type of agreement in place saying, "Look, we're gonna push as much as we can for these in-market Braves games that we have access to, but if you really want to still hit an engaged audience, we're gonna use a Major League Baseball streaming package as well, too, which could run on your ESPN+'s, it can run on Fox Sports, it can run on TBS, and we're gonna access that through specific streaming services and partners like a DirecTV, a Sling."

And I think as long as the education piece is there, the broadcasters are able to make that pivot. We're definitely a partner to all of our broadcast clients that we work with to ensure that they have best practices in place, understanding the ecosystem, and then giving recommendations of how do we capture more dollars in market, and also ensure that there are more eyeballs available by leveraging these programmatic streaming services that now have live sports available.

Tim Hanlon: All right, let me back up for a second because it's interesting. I wanna put that in perspective to the fan experience. As many baseball fans, especially this season, recognize and to a lesser extent, the NBA and the NHL, because this RSN collapse is happening in the mid to end of the season.

A lot of the local broadcasts don't really carry them anymore because the playoffs are here. But will kick in more next year. It's a chore and then some, to comprehensively watch or follow one's baseball team, regardless of market. Very few of them have one or two places to go anymore.

When you divvy up and you understand the exclusive and non-exclusive national windows and that kind of stuff, as a typical Yankees or Cubs fan, for example, you're probably looking at three, four, five, maybe even seven or eight different, if you want to be a completist for the entire season, places that you need to have covered, so to speak.

So what you've just described, it sounds like what you're trying to do is help marketers ensure that wherever these games are, we'll be there for you to create and enable you to reach that audience on a persistent and regular basis, regardless of touch point. So let me ask you this question: How confident are you, given all the different shards of stuff, that you can do that 100% at this very moment?

I gotta think there's still some gaps in your realm, and maybe frankly, even the broadcast stations themselves being the biggest. 

Anthony Campanella: Yeah, this is not an easy solve. There's no doubt about it. So we've set up to ensure that we're at least hitting specific leagues in live broadcasts, right?

We're not talking about sports content. We're talking about the live broadcasts of games, be it MLB, NBA, NHL, NCAA football, Monday Night Football. No matter what that league is, we're trying to ensure that we are hitting that audience during a live broadcast within a specific DMA and geo where we cannot do a guarantee where some of these broadcasters have the rights to sell, again, a specific game. We are not, one, allowed to sell that way because of carriage right agreements and the way they are packaged.

Two, we have to be very careful in ensuring that we are providing what we're saying we're providing. There are a lot of bad actors out there, unfortunately, that take advantage of some, maybe not as knowledgeable sales teams. "Hey, we'll go ahead and sell you a million impressions in a Cleveland Browns game on Sunday," when NFL's not even available programmatically or cannot be purchased outside of Fox or CBS, right?

So again it goes back to that education piece. But to get back to the original question about guaranteeing, you have to work directly with the leagues, you have to work directly with the streamers that have the carriage rights, and you have to work directly with the channel partners that have these rights.

If you're trying to do any of this in what we call open auction programmatically, it's not gonna be accurate, it's not gonna be the audience you want. And what we do to ensure that you're actually getting the audience that you are purchasing is setting up these direct deals and ensuring that we're running during the live broadcast.

But right now, the biggest gap and the biggest thing that we need to figure out from a programmatic landscape when it comes to live sports and supporting local buys is how do we get more of that specific team, that specific event, that Saturday at noon Georgia versus Florida game? That's where we're going to have to keep on evolving, and that's the gap right now between traditional broadcast and the streaming offering.

Tim Hanlon: In the old days, this would've been obviously a far less complicated environment. This would be akin to something along the lines of an unwired network, right? Where you're essentially bespoke creating a network, if you will, by property or by situation or whatever it might be.

Where you're, in essence, trying to, and in some respects, frankly, maybe doing this by team, against a couple of different leagues. So that's dozens of, if you will, unwired networks that try to approximate or closely approximate full coverage, if you will, for when those games are on, regardless of where they're broadcast or where they're seen.

It's gotta be bedeviling for folks like you guys when even the rights seem to be almost changing in real time, right? There are a number of  Major League Baseball teams that didn't have their deals done until literally opening day this year because of the uncertainty of these RSNs that were owned by Main Street or some of these other deals that were floating around.

Anthony Campanella: Yeah. It goes back to “How do you keep up with that?” 

Yeah, we talk about Frankenstacks, right? When you have fragmented different types of swivel chair approach with DSPs. The same thing could be said for live sports. So there is a ton of fragmentation with these rights.

The way we deal with it, again, is we focus at the league level. The league level has allowed us to cast a wider net on these live events. We know we can run in a certain area. We know that it's gonna be live broadcast within these specific leagues. Those are the guarantees we put in place. What we need to do and continue to do is educate on the value, right?

Why is this important for an advertiser to hit this fan in this area? Obviously, if somebody is an Atlanta Braves fan, they're in Atlanta, and the Braves are playing, there's a good chance it's gonna run in that game. We don't guarantee that, though, right? So strategize when you actually wanna run. Look at the schedules.

Think about, "Hey, I can actually reach more consumers that fit this type of criteria I'm looking for," by not just even bucketing to a Braves only or a Yankees only type of approach, but really focus on the fan itself, really focus on the moment, and focus on the area where I'm trying to get my message out to.

And that's how we've been able to run and with the ebbs and flows that happen with this, and we're prepared. Even if a contract's getting done a day before the season starts, we already have access to those who are gonna have the carriage rights. And even if an RSN loses something, we are able to pick up the slack where those games are actually being picked up.

We saw MLB.tv go on ESPN. We saw when FanDuel lost. We saw that Victory Plus picked up a lot of different things. We were ready for all of that, and that's how we prep for it. 

Tim Hanlon: All right. So let me talk about a couple of things as we cul-de-sac this. How do you deal with some of these broadcasters that have been stepping up to absorb at least some of the game inventory that's being lost to RSNs, either with or without partnership on the DTC front that the team might be owning and also programming or maybe separately simulcasting or whatever.

Gray, certainly with their little regional diginet approaches and their little sports network creation. Scripps is certainly very active with a number of teams. Sinclair with some of the teams in Utah with SEG the owners of those teams. Are broadcasters in this time and realm easier or more difficult to deal with given their relative nascence or nascency around streaming or reluctance, frankly, to go into streaming?

Anthony Campanella: Yeah. I think everybody you named actually are really good examples. And I think they have put in the work out of those three as well, and then especially like Scripps, too, who we work very closely with, and it's really cool to see that they've built their own sports network across the NBA, NWSL, and these different leagues.

I think those who are investing in it are doing the due diligence of what we need to do to scale it. So if they're putting the time in to invest in sports and understanding, "Hey, there's a ceiling on what we can sell," usually the conversation becomes a little bit easier when it comes to partnership, when it comes to helping them potentially sell some of their unsold, which in many cases, they do a great job of selling that out.

But I would say that those who are putting in the time and the investment already understand the streaming piece is part of the overall puzzle, and it makes it a little bit easier to have that conversation. They know that fragmentation's bad for all of their advertisers, so they wanna figure out the best way to say "All right, we know what we do very well. But now how do we take it another step further working with these streaming partners, working with a partner who can help us expand out of what we have rights to?" And the conversations are usually a lot easier when that investment's already been made. 

Tim Hanlon: It also strikes me, though, there does seem to be some real tension between what the broadcaster historically does and has done, and what the DTC, direct-to-consumer streaming situation might be.

So it seems to be different in every market. In most cases, I don't think, frankly, in all cases, these local broadcasters that are doing these games ordinarily do not have access to the streaming rights. Those are generally retained by the team or the situation.

Where they own that stream, and it's probably more of a subscription-oriented product, a la or adjacent to or part of an RSN. I guess the question there is, streaming rights kinda matter, right? And I wonder if the next step for some of those aforementioned broadcast groups who are so into local sports these days needs to be creating, going for also including those streaming rights too, so they can be more holistically packageable, so to speak, right?

Because what I see right now is a diversion between there's the broadcast and then there's the stream. And the questions seem to be, who owns those ads? Are they simulcast? Are they separate inventory pools? And frankly broadcasters a lot of times are not even producing these games.

They're just carrying the feed that the team is actually producing. So it just seems hairy to me still that maybe the consolidation or the deeper partnership of what the stream and the broadcast looks like needs to be more tight, so to speak, going forward. 

Anthony Campanella: Yeah, it's definitely not uniform, right? Some teams are going to sell more to streamers than make available for their local broadcast because, again, it's a dollar and cents game.

What is going to get, again, the most eyeballs, the most advertisers in? And the rights that the broadcasters have versus the streamers, sometimes you could potentially see two different broadcasts going on at the same thing. You have a YES Network playing a Yankee game. Plus, they could also be on ESPN.

It happens, right? It's not like that's unheard of. And the games that are exclusive, obviously that's a much clearer path forward on who owns what. But you mentioned simulcast. Fox simulcast a Super Bowl on Tubi that was an extension play for those advertisers.

Tubi had no rights to sell those. Now, obviously, Tubi's a Fox company, but in that case, there was no programmatic Tubi to be bought for the Super Bowl or for that to go out and be sold. So there are some simulcasts where they could do a digital ad insertion, where that's agreed upon ahead of time, and then they do have the rights where they can monetize that extension.

They can sell X amount of it. Or maybe they do a rev share back to where they're getting the rights from. There are a lot of different ways that this can be set up, and just saying it gives me a headache because there are so many different ways that we could do it. And the reality is that there is no uniformity for it, and teams themselves have a lot of rights outside of the NFL.

The NFL's pretty straightforward. But as, even in the NBA, MLB is probably the most Wild West in the case of, hey, the teams have the most rights to distribute where they want and where they can to maximize their return. But at the end of the day, until there's one solidified "Hey, these are the broadcast rules for streaming. You get X amount," you're gonna have some disparagement as far as scale and where, what goes where. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah. We should have another conversation or two about this, because we could spend a whole half hour, and I'd like to, frankly, on the streaming side of it and the different approaches that they take business-wise, that some will take care of the production and the ad sales, and others will be just, a vendor for production and that kind of stuff.

But I'll save that for hopefully another conversation. But let me end with, for this conversation, with this question, and maybe this is a little crystal ball-ish. What's floating around right now is this sort of thesis that maybe half of what we've been talking about is all short-term discussion in waiting for what most feel that the NBA, and Major League Baseball in particular, maybe the NHL not so fast as those two, that are gonna centralize, nationally centralize local rights and become their own distribution platform, so to speak.

I think Amazon has had some design on maybe being that as well, try to mimic their old Prime Video channels model, where you can basically just go to Amazon and all the subscriptions that you have can be viewed through their platform as well, or you could subscribe through that.

But what's your take on the NBA's and Major League Baseball's, let's stick to those two, capabilities or approaches maybe to centralizing these local rights so that not only they're more in control, but maybe it makes it a lot easier for fans instead of having this, all this crazy polyglot-ness we've got today? You think they're capable of it? 

Anthony Campanella: I don't think the question is capability. I think, yeah, they absolutely could do that. It's the want in a lot of cases, right? Do they wanna do that? Do they want to necessarily limit themselves to their own in-house, right? We looked at what really, I think, pushed this next level of streaming, streamers buying rights and almost making walled garden types of approaches where you could see a broadcast anywhere before, was that Kansas City playoff game I wanna say two to three years ago, when NBC bought it for $125 million, and it was the biggest boost ever of subscribers, right?

So if I'm getting one game, if I'm a league like the NFL for $125 million, or if I'm getting one game from the NBA that could be $60 million just right into our pockets, it's very hard to say, "Look, we're gonna centralize all this. We're gonna put all our eggs into our own tech." We're going to say, "Our sales teams are gonna go out and sell this, and the rest will sell programmatically, and we're gonna be able to control this entire ecosystem," and almost forcing the hand of the customer and the actual fan to go there and take a look, "Hey, I gotta download this to get access to my games."

Does that make sense from a business standpoint? I think the tech's there. The tech is obviously there. They could do that tomorrow in most cases. But does it make sense from a business standpoint, a distribution standpoint? Does it hurt the brand? Yeah, it does, I think. And I think that's why they've been hesitant to centralize everything into one part of this, and that's why we see a lot of the different fragmentation still, because they are going to meet the fan where they can, expand as many eyeballs as possible.

And right now, though it seems super fragmented and all over the place to us, it is working for them because they continue to make more and more TV revenue, streaming revenue every year. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, it's interesting. The NBA, this is the first season of their new deals, right? There is no more regional playoff coverage, matches and games and stuff.

So this is also an adjustment for the fans as well. Now whether the NBA is just making that step forward towards more centralization of, and hubbing, if you will, of all of this stuff, they've certainly taken the playoffs off the table. Maybe that's a proof positive that they can bring that to bear for some form of uniformity for local rights as well in a centralized streaming thing.

We'll literally wait and see. But the value of local I don't think is questioned here. Still, the local broadcasters or the local announcers, the local coverage of the team, the regularity of coverage, the understanding of the nuances of the play of the team and stuff that can only be best understood and communicated to fans, against the length of a schedule, a length of a season. The ins and outs and the scenarios and the stories and that kind of stuff. It's hard to dip in and out of that kind of stuff. And frankly, I think consumers get gypped by seeing different flavors of local to have to choose from for all their games and stuff.

You lose that continuity, I think, with that centralization thing. So I don't know. I'm speaking as a fan, but you can't ignore that because fans are the ones who pay the bills. 

Anthony Campanella: Yeah, and I think to your point too, when you talk about playoffs in particular that is very much the tent pole of the season.

At the end there, maybe your team is not in the playoffs and they had those specific, local rights as well. So now are we scrambling to make up for access to that? Are you airing out-of-market games? No, right? So like the playoffs make a ton of sense. When you talk about creating that hub, not making it available.

Again, it's sorta like it's a logistics thing as well too. If we know we're definitely running on ESPN versus NESN, it makes a lot more sense to get that planned ahead of time, get that sold through ahead of time, and have that understanding. So I honestly think if you put the crystal ball, like you said, on there, I think we're going to see more of the same for a little bit.

But as much as they can make it more uniform, of course they're going to push it that way. But if it ever affects their bottom line, ever affects their viewership, they will pull back, right? We've even seen it with MLB.TV. They had a lot of distribution last year, and we loved to see it.

We thought that was great. And now that it's MLB.TV through ESPN now, it's definitely shown, to your point, it's more of a national play for in-market games. And, this could be very much a testing ground on how did this work this year? Did we see the same type of return? Did we see an increase in eyeballs or a decrease in markets?

I think all of that's gonna come into play, and it's gonna be very interesting to kinda see what the results are at the end of the season. 

Tim Hanlon: All right let's put a pin in this conversation because I think in a couple of months we should revisit it and get more into the streaming things.

As we record this yesterday or the day before, DAZN just bought one of the major DTC streaming platform companies, a company called ViewLift, and it looks like DAZN is going to try to maybe take a stab at trying to perhaps be a local hub for this kind of streaming stuff too, for local. So more to come.

This has been great. I think we proverbially just scratched the surface, but if you're up for it, let's make a pact to meet again in another couple of months and revisit where we stand at this point. 

Anthony Campanella: If you'll have me back, I would love to be back. So thank you again, 

Tim Hanlon: All right. Let's talk to the powers that be. I think I know some people. 

Anthony Campanella: Yeah, you know a guy? Okay, great.

Tim Hanlon: All right. That's all we got for you this week, but definitely a topic that we are gonna return to in the weeks and months ahead. Hopefully Anthony will join us for those as we try to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of local media and sports. My thanks not only to him, but also the great team at TVREV who puts this stuff out for us each and every week.

We appreciate it. That's Jason Damata and Melissa Hourigan especially this week. Our friends over at Madhive, Stephanie Nerby and Nicole Lewis, and of course the inimitable Jerry Payne, whose audio excellence we could not do without. Case in point this week. Once again, thank you, kind sir. And we thank you for listening.

Many more topics and conversations to come. Thanks for joining us here In the Vicinity.