There are only two ways to make money from making baseball games available for people who aren’t there:

  1. You can ask people to pay you for the rights to broadcast the games.  At that point, the money-making part is someone else’s problem; or
  2. You can broadcast the games yourself, at which point you need to do a lot of things:
    1. Procure the infrastructure to broadcast: studios, announcers, technicians, trucks, transmission facilities (over-the-air, cable, streaming, telepathy), including finding partners who will take on some or all of these tasks.
    1. Figure out how to charge for your service and market it, including finding partners who will take on some or all of these tasks.

Note that this whole “finding partners” method 2 can make methods 1 and 2 pretty much blur together.  To the extent that your partner is someone who provides the infrastructure and does your marketing in return for a fixed fee, you have pretty much transformed one into the other.  But variations in how much your partners do and how the money is shared creates variations,

Before 1976, the Braves were firmly method 1.  When Ted Turner, who was broadcasting the Braves’ games on WTCG bought them in 1976 (for $12 million, which is less than one of his houses costs today) he pioneered Step 2, but it was made immensely easier by the fact that he already had all the parts in place: he owned a cable production and distribution company and the cable company sold its output to local cable companies.  He needed an MLB schedule, some new production trucks, a contract with Delta Airlines, Ernie and Skip and he was done. 

Turner sold TBS and the Braves to Time Warner in 1996 and Time Warner was less interested in baseball content, gradually reducing the Braves broadcasts until finally spinning off the Braves to John Malone in 2007, at which point they were fully back in method 1.  They signed a number of bad deals in which the revenue they received per viewer was far lower than other broadcast networks around the country, but their partner, Turner South (later Sports South, Later FSN South, then Bally Sports and lastly FanDuel Sports) finally went bankrupt.  Their contract reverted to the Braves who, unlike most of the other FanDuel teams, have decided to return to their roots with Method 2 rather than letting MLB, inheritor of the FanDuel pieces, be their partner.

Who’s going to do the infrastructure and marketing?  They haven’t told us yet, but let us know that they indtend to go back to Method 1.  But as good as they are at real estate, I think this move has come way too late.  I’m sure they’ve looked at this very, very closely, and I’m just a schlub with a computer, but getting people to sign up for one more streaming service today is, I think, an uphill battle.  And it’s not getting better.

All of this is somewhat moot is the Braves adopt either the Amazon or Apple+ platforms.  But it will still be an issue, maybe even more of an issue, if Braves games form their own tier, since now people who only want the Braves will have to subscribe for an extra $100 or so a year just to have access to Braves streaming.

I presume the Braves are only in this for the money, and if it works well enough to allow us to afford Framber Valdez, I’m here for it.  But if it doesn’t make more than the rent for the Omni Hotel at The Battery, or loses money, I’m agin’ it.

I may revisit this once we have some clarity as to what the TV package is going to be, but for the moment, I’m scratching my head.