How Will Selig Sell the Extra Innings Deal to Fans?
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
NY Times
Earlier this week, it looked as if Major League Baseball’s ever-pending deal that would move the Extra Innings package of out-of-market games exclusively to DirecTV might be announced today. That is no longer likely. It may happen Monday, next month or by the All-Star Game break.
But the interminable delay — for a product that needs to be in place by opening day — has provided ample time for contemplation.
How will Commissioner Bud Selig make this sound beneficial to former buyers of Extra Innings on cable when he finally discusses it in detail? How will M.L.B. step out of the muck of bad publicity surrounding the deal, assuming there are enough owners to approve it?
More specifically, can Selig make M.L.B.’s betrothal to DirecTV look like anything but a way to a) push abandoned cable subscribers to an mlb.com service, mlb.tv (cost: $89.95 or $119.95) to increase centralized revenue coursing from M.L.B. Advanced Media, which runs baseball’s on-line world, and b) ensure that 15 million DirecTV homes will get the new 24/7 baseball channel that is to start in 2009 in time for the second World Baseball Classic?
One more question: With so much baseball available nationally and locally, who will watch the planned channel?
Perhaps by design, Major League Baseball has given itself two years to persuade cable operators to carry the proposed channel. It will need every minute of that time. In early talks, cable operators refused to guarantee broad distribution of the new network, which catapulted baseball into its love match with DirecTV.
Why would cable operators, now without Extra Innings, carry the new channel, even if it turns out to be terrific? What is the incentive?
The channel will most likely carry a Thursday or a Saturday night game of the week (do we need another?) with more camera and aural access than other networks get (which should tick off the other networks). But will that attract cable operators any more than those who have refused to carry the NFL Network even with its eight regular-season games?
Baseball can assess the history of the NFL Network and NBA TV for guidance. NBA TV has only 12 million cable and satellite subscriptions (some of them on digital sports tiers), but Commissioner David Stern said he was pleased.
“We have the penetration we projected,” he said yesterday by telephone, “an enormous promotional platform and a digital gateway into our other offerings, telling fans about our broadband and V.O.D.” — video on demand.
The NFL Network, while it is in 40 million cable and satellite homes, is not in the 29 million homes of Time Warner, Cablevision and Charter customers; it is also suing Comcast for wanting to carry it on a marginalized digital sports tier, not the broader digital tier where it is now available.
When asked last year why Cablevision didn’t carry the NFL Network, James L. Dolan, the company’s president, raised his industry’s lingering resentment that the National Football League’s Sunday Ticket out-of-market package of games has always been the exclusive domain of DirecTV.
Give me Sunday Ticket, he reasoned, and I’ll carry the NFL Network.
Baseball will march into that toxic environment. But even if the channel signs up no cable subscribers for a year or two, Major League Baseball will not be at a total loss.
“The reality is,” said Lee Berke, an industry consultant, “DirecTV is, outside of Comcast, the largest distributor of subscription TV. So if you do a DirecTV deal, you start with a good base.”
If the baseball channel is well-received, Berke suggested, cable operators are likely to reconsider, but slowly. “There is precedent in cable that when a deal is done with a competitor, they get upset and standoffish, but they’re in the content and subscriber business,” he said.
It appears unlikely that M.L.B. will reconsider its close dancing with DirecTV, regardless of the many fans (among the nearly 200,000 cable buyers of it last year) who have squawked about it or signed petitions against it. But Selig and others will, once they announce the deal, have to do more than brush aside the concerns of those who cannot switch from cable to DirecTV, or shoo them to the broadband-delivered games on mlb.tv.
And he must not try to sell this as an innovation, like interleague play, or a labor coup, like expanding drug testing. This is a business transaction that so far has served only to rile a subset of devoted fans.
