Major League Baseball may soon have a way to cut the cost of living for many baseball fans across the country.
The league wants to create a streaming service that will allow fans to watch their home market teams’ games without a cable subscription. It’s a great idea for a couple of reasons.
Traditional cable and satellite TV subscriptions are on the decline. The cost associated with them just isn’t worth it for many people when there are cheaper streaming services and plenty of free content to watch online. That’s bad for MLB because without a cable or satellite TV subscription, there is no way to watch most games in one’s home market. MLB.TV only allows fans to watch out-of-market games, so it has a limited purpose. It’s useful for a Boston Red Sox fan who lives in Maryland or South Dakota but not one who lives fewer than 30 miles from Fenway Park.
A hometown team streaming service would allow baseball to recapture some of those fans who would watch some games if they had cable, increasing the teams’ popularity. It’s also a good way to save people money.
The service would also give people an incentive to cut cable. If they can pay $10 per month to watch baseball, $10 for a streaming service, and $10 for a news service, that’s far cheaper than paying $100 or more per month for cable, as most people who have cable do, according to Statista. Or if all someone wants is the baseball streaming service, then they save even more money. If this service can save someone $50 per month, that’s $600 per year (or more if fans don’t have to pay for the baseball streaming service during the offseason). If a politician gave someone a $600 tax cut, they would tout it as a significant achievement.
One of the major problems with cable is that it forces people to pay for things they don’t need to get what they want. If someone doesn’t watch the filler content on the sports station they have to have so they can watch their favorite team play, then it’s a waste of their money to fund it. It’s also a waste of the person’s money to fund the majority of the channels they don’t watch on TV. The average viewer watches fewer than 10% of the channels they have, according to Nielsen. That’s inefficient and raises people’s cost of living without giving much of a benefit in return.
If MLB wants to up its viewership and save people money, this is the way to do it.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
