Tuesday, May 30, was the Padres’ last broadcast on Bally Sports San Diego.
Parent company Diamond Sports failed to make payments last week and the grace period expired, leading to the return of broadcast rights to the Padres and Major League Baseball.
The Padres and MLB will now partner on a direct-to-consumer streaming option, an effort that includes a permanent end to local restrictions. Starting Wednesday, May 31, and through the end of the weekend, fans will be able to watch Padres games for free on the MLB apps at MLB.com and Padres.com (a paid subscription will be required after that). ,
MLB has already closed deals with DirecTV, AT&T U-Verse, Cox, Spectrum and fuboTV to broadcast Padres games. The channel lineup was announced on Tuesday night. The Padres on-screen broadcast teams will remain in place, as they are team employees.
“We are preparing for this momentous moment,” Padres CEO Eric Greipner said in a statement sent to the Union-Tribune. “Being the first team to partner with Major League Baseball to offer a direct-to-consumer streaming option on MLB.TV without cutouts, while preserving our in-market distribution through providers, cable and satellite television Excited for. Our fans will now have unprecedented access to Padres games across digital and traditional platforms throughout San Diego and beyond.”
MLB was in a position to take over the broadcast amid bankruptcy proceedings aimed at eliminating more than $8 billion in outstanding debt from Diamond.
After Diamond announced it would not make its payment before the grace period expired on Tuesday, a spokesperson provided the following statement:
“Diamond Sports Group (DSG) has decided not to provide additional funding to San Diego RSN to pay royalties to the San Diego Padres during the grace period and will cease airing Padres games after Tuesday, May 30. Although DSG has significant liquidity and is paying royalties to teams, the economics of the Padres’ contract were not in line with market realities. MLB has pressured us by continuing to refuse to trade direct-to-consumer (DTC) broadcast rights for all of the company’s teams, despite our offer to pay each team in full in exchange for those rights. We continue to broadcast matches for the teams as per our contracts.”
Diamond paid last-minute on his 20-year, $1.2 billion contract with the Padres — about $60 million per year through 2032 — on the eve of opening day, though highlighted that deal as particularly problematic for him. it was done. In the midst of the cord-cutting era.
The New York Post reported in March that the Padres deal was worth Diamond at $20 million a year.
In March, the courts found that Diamond’s regional sports networks had lost 22 million subscribers and $810 million in revenue over the past four years. The 22.6% decline was partially due to the drop of Bally Sports channels across the country by distributors such as YouTube TV and Hulu+ Live TV.
Diamond owns the broadcast rights to the games of five of its 14 MLB partners. His desire to purchase the remainder at a reasonable price—which includes the Padres’ streaming rights—was turned down by MLB, a major obstacle to Diamond’s hopes of recouping lost income.
An MLB attorney argued in court in March that Diamond could not compel teams to provide additional streaming rights, nor that it was the league’s responsibility to fix a “broken model” that had contributed to baseball’s ever-growing economy. Played an important role.
Sinclair bought Fox Sports Networks in 2019 for $10.6 billion and established Diamond Sports as its regional sports network arm. During the bankruptcy, Diamond is seeking to be separated from Sinclair as an independent company. Those proceedings do not include the Padres deal because the team owns a 20% stake in Bali Sports San Diego (formerly Fox Sports San Diego), as agreed upon during a deal signed in 2012, when Ron Fowler and Peter Seidler purchased the Padres.
