Regional sports network

But here, the strategy they've taken is they've picked up a lot of the local NBA, MLB, NFL rights.

And they're kind of, if you've heard of Valley Sports, they're kind of picking up the bankruptcy of the RSNs and saying, We're a big global company.

We have tens of millions of subscribers.

We can make this profitable in America doing domestic, local coverage of some of these sports.

Now they're looking at it differently and going, okay, now I have a new revenue stream.

Now I have access to a new fan segment because traditionally, if you do a deal with an RSN or a broadcaster or whatever, that fan data typically stays with them.

Very rarely does it pass through the wall over to the other side.

So now you have all of this data, all of this fan segmentation sitting over in your DTC streaming environment, and you want to mesh all of that together.

I think part of the reason maybe they're behind on the first-party data is...

Let's take DTC streaming as an example, right? Historically, there's no first-party data associated with that on the team side.

That resides with the RSN or the broadcaster or whatever.

So...

We could be well into the 2030s, in my estimation, before we see a return to the kind of baseline fan affinity numbers that we have now.

I guess it's all the more precarious for baseball with the RSN issue and just the monetization of baseball content through media.

If this had happened even 10 years ago, maybe there may be a higher level of certainty for Major League Baseball.

So maybe this is going to give them, maybe not pause, but it's certainly something that they're aware of, I would expect.

Yeah, and this is something that came up as I was making the rounds during the World Series as well, that we've got these national TV rights that are up after the 2028 season, and the league and Rob Manfred have been very clear about their desire to get very creative about repackaging those local and national rights and fill-in-the-blank network coming in and having a fundamentally different set of menu offerings because they're kind of shaking up the Magic 8-Ball here.

And, you know, reorienting those rights, because, again, if we've got a dismantling of the traditional RSN structure, you pull everything together and there's a real interesting opportunity to rethink how you go to market with all that stuff.

But if you're going to market with a fundamentally impaired product because of labor issues, that cuts into what your market opportunity is.

Get you out on this.

We could be well into the 2030s, in my estimation, before we see a return to the kind of baseline fan affinity numbers that we have now.

I guess it's all the more precarious for baseball with the RSN issue and just the monetization of baseball content through media.

If this had happened even 10 years ago, maybe there may be a higher level of certainty for Major League Baseball.

So maybe this is going to give them, maybe not pause, but it's certainly something that they're aware of, I would expect.

Yeah, and this is something that came up as I was making the rounds during the World Series as well, that we've got these national TV rights that are up after the 2028 season, and the league and Rob Manfred have been very clear about their desire to get very creative about repackaging those local and national rights and fill-in-the-blank network coming in and having a fundamentally different set of menu offerings because they're kind of shaking up the Magic 8-Ball here.

And, you know, reorienting those rights, because, again, if we've got a dismantling of the traditional RSN structure, you pull everything together and there's a real interesting opportunity to rethink how you go to market with all that stuff.

But if you're going to market with a fundamentally impaired product because of labor issues, that cuts into what your market opportunity is.

Get you out on this.