A grown up look at how the regional sports network went from a $20 billion machine to a dark screen, and why every league in America is now building its own front door to the fan.
By Andy Abramson | comunicano | July 14th 2026
Only 34.4% of American households still pay for cable or satellite TV. Global sports rights spending just crossed $67 billion. And the company that used to broadcast 29 NBA, NHL and MLB teams shut its doors mid contract, in the middle of two live seasons, because it ran out of money to pay the leagues it was supposed to be serving.
Those three facts are not unrelated. They are the same story told three different ways.
For thirty years I’ve watched sports and media get sold to the public as if they were two different businesses. They were never two different businesses. Sports is a content business, and content businesses live or die on distribution. The regional sports network was the distribution model. It just collapsed. And what’s rising in its place will change who owns the fan relationship for a generation.
This is a longer piece than usual. It has to be. There’s a lot of money that just changed hands, and most of the coverage treated it as a series of disconnected headlines. It isn’t. It’s one migration, happening on every level of the sport business at once. Let’s take it apart.
The bundle that used to pay for everything
Here is the number that matters more than any single deal: 80.7 million U.S. households will have walked away from traditional pay TV by the end of 2026. In December 2025 alone, streaming captured 47.5% of total U.S. TV consumption while cable fell to just 20.2%.
The threshold that should have made every sports team owner in America sit up straight came and went quietly in the fourth quarter of 2025, when Madison and Wall analyst Brian Wieser calculated that traditional pay TV had fallen below 50% of American households for the first time since the format existed. By early 2026, only 34.4% of households still had pay TV at all. The broader breakdown of what replaced it, and why, reads like an obituary written slowly over fifteen years: rising bills, on demand convenience, and an entire generation that simply never signed up in the first place.
Fine. Cable has been dying for a decade. Everyone in media knows that story. What most people outside the industry never understood is how much local sports depended on the corpse.
The regional sports network model worked because it didn’t ask anyone’s permission. RSNs paid teams fixed, guaranteed rights fees, and funded those fees by charging a per subscriber carriage fee to every cable and satellite customer in the market, whether that customer cared about baseball or not. You paid for the Dodgers whether you watched them or not. That is not a business model. That is a tax. And it was a spectacular one, worth 20% to 30% of a franchise’s total annual revenue for a team like the Dodgers, who pulled roughly $196 million a year in local TV money, against $17 million for a small market club like the Padres. Bring that gap into a broader lockout conversation and you start to understand why baseball’s labor peace is about to get interesting.
A tax works only as long as people can’t opt out. They opted out.
Sinclair’s ten billion dollar bet on a shrinking pie
The plot has a villain, or at least a company that made a historically bad wager. When Disney bought most of 21st Century Fox in 2017, antitrust regulators forced the divestiture of the RSNs Fox owned, a portfolio valued at more than $20 billion. Sinclair Broadcasting bought it for roughly $10 billion, loaded it with debt, and called the resulting company Diamond Sports Group.
Diamond filed Chapter 11 in March 2023. It spent twenty months in bankruptcy court shedding networks and team contracts, and emerged in January 2025 with $9 billion of pre petition debt wiped down to $200 million, operating 16 RSNs covering 13 NBA teams, 8 NHL teams and 8 MLB clubs under a new name: Main Street Sports Group.
A clean balance sheet and a new logo. That was the pitch.
It lasted thirteen months.
Main Street’s second death, and this time nobody bailed them out
Bankruptcy fixes a balance sheet. It does not fix a business model built on subscribers who keep leaving. By late 2025, Main Street had lost roughly $200 million for the year and still owed its 13 NBA teams about $180 million in unpaid rights fees. In December 2025 the company missed a scheduled payment to the St. Louis Cardinals, the first public tell that the second collapse was already underway.
There was a lifeline on the table. DAZN, the London based streaming platform, spent months in talks to buy the company. The deal died over terms, DAZN wanted reduced local rights fees, additional digital rights and contract extensions through at least 2028 to 2029, and the teams, already bleeding, said no. By early January 2026 all nine of Main Street’s MLB clubs, the Angels, Braves, Brewers, Cardinals, Marlins, Rays, Reds, Royals and Tigers, had formally terminated their agreements.
The end came in stages, the way most corporate deaths do. In February 2026, Main Street issued WARN Act notices to its entire staff. On April 2, the company told all remaining 13 NBA and seven NHL teams it would cease operations at the end of their respective seasons. The FanDuel Sports Networks went dark. Twenty nine franchises across three leagues lost their local broadcast partner in the span of one calendar year.
$180 million owed. Zero dollars paid. That is what a guaranteed rights fee is worth when the guarantor runs out of subscribers to tax.
Who actually got stiffed
Numbers on a balance sheet are abstractions until you attach a logo to them. The Miami Heat were owed $55 million for 2026. The Cleveland Cavaliers, $34 million. The Los Angeles Clippers, $34.59 million. The Atlanta Hawks, $32 million. The Milwaukee Bucks, $24 million. None of it arrived. Teams are expected to recover up to 60% of it eventually, from creditors, once dissolution paperwork clears.
Baseball felt it harder, because baseball plays 162 games to basketball’s 82, and local TV carries proportionally more of the revenue load. The Cardinals’ new MLB managed broadcast deal is expected to generate between $18 million and $20 million for 2026, down from roughly $58 million the year before, a loss of $38 to $40 million in a single year for one franchise. Brewers owner Mark Attanasio said the quiet part out loud, calling his own team’s $20 million hit “a pretty big one off” that, so far, hasn’t touched payroll. So far.
A typical NBA franchise pulls $300 million to $800 million in annual revenue, with $30 to $40 million of that historically coming from RSN fees. The early movers who jumped before the collapse forced everyone’s hand felt the pain first: Phoenix and Utah left their RSN deals and saw revenue fall roughly 25% and 50% respectively. The Jazz’s Ryan Smith watched his over the air viewership climb from 760,000 homes to 6.3 million, and still said flatly that the money didn’t match. Reach went up. Revenue went down. That is the trade every team in this migration is now negotiating, whether they say so publicly or not.
The NBA answers with $77 billion, and shuts out the incumbent
While local sports media was quietly bleeding out, the national market was doing the opposite. In July 2024 the NBA signed an eleven year, $77 billion media rights deal with Disney/ESPN, NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime Video, nearly tripling the prior contract’s value. Disney pays roughly $2.6 billion a year and keeps the Finals. NBC pays about $2.5 billion annually and returns to the NBA for the first time since 2002, splitting games between NBC and Peacock. Amazon pays roughly $1.8 billion a season for 66 exclusive regular season games.
Add it up and every one of the NBA’s 247 nationally televised games in 2025 to 2026 is available on a streaming platform, a 43.6% jump in national game availability over the prior season. And Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT, the network that carried the NBA for decades, got shut out entirely.
Read that twice. The league didn’t add streaming to cable. It chose streaming over its longest running cable partner. That is not a hedge. That is a decision about where the audience actually lives now.
ESPN stops asking the cable guy for permission
If one date belongs on the tombstone of the old model, it’s August 21, 2025, the day ESPN launched its own direct to consumer streaming service, a move chairman Jimmy Pitaro called “one of the biggest days at ESPN, if not the biggest”. Priced at $29.99 a month for the full “Unlimited” tier, with an $11.99 “Select” option underneath it, the service puts all twelve ESPN linear networks and more than 47,000 live events a year on your phone. No cable box required.
Disney CEO Bob Iger called it “potentially the most significant development since acquiring the full season of the NFL”. I don’t disagree, but I’d frame it differently. ESPN just admitted that the cable bundle, the thing that made ESPN the most valuable network in television for thirty years, is no longer the strongest asset ESPN owns. The brand is the asset. The bundle was just how you used to reach people. Bundled with Disney+ and Hulu, the service functions as a next generation cable package built entirely around sports, and it gives ESPN’s own subscribers a clean pipe straight into the NBA’s new streaming heavy contract.
Amazon, meanwhile, isn’t waiting around either. It committed $3.8 billion to sports rights in 2026, its largest ever spend in a single year and enough to pass DAZN as the single biggest spender in sports streaming. Thursday Night Football, NBA rights, and a now moot local RSN distribution deal struck with Main Street on its way out of bankruptcy. Amazon bought a seat at every table before most of the industry finished reading the menu.
Zoom out and the numbers get almost comically large. Global sports rights spending hit $67.34 billion in 2026, up 9.6% from the year before, with North America alone accounting for $34.9 billion of it. Meanwhile linear TV upfront advertising fell between 4.5% and 10% for the 2025 to 2026 season, while sports TV ad spend, led by the NFL, is projected to approach $25 billion by 2027. The money isn’t disappearing. It’s changing addresses.
Baseball stops waiting for a savior and builds its own network
Major League Baseball did the thing most legacy industries never do when their distributor collapses. It built the replacement itself, faster than anyone expected.
By opening day 2026, MLB was producing and distributing local broadcasts directly for 14 clubs, with in market streaming available to 20 teams through the MLB App. For the first time in the sport’s history, all 30 teams now offer a direct to consumer, blackout free streaming product, and every one of the league’s 30 teams has one, with 14 already flipped into the league’s own broadcast umbrella.
Pricing runs team by team, $99.99 a year for the Royals is one benchmark, and ESPN has taken over MLB.TV, the out of market product, bundling it into its own Unlimited tier alongside 150 additional out of market games. The blackout, the single most fan hostile feature of the old RSN system, is gone.
Here’s the catch nobody’s putting on a press release. The MLB managed model doesn’t guarantee anyone a rights fee. Teams get paid whatever the product actually earns. That is the entire structural shift in one sentence: guaranteed income has been replaced by performance based income, and not every market performs the same. Some teams, the Braves reportedly weighing an independent, team owned network, are hedging by keeping a foot outside the league’s system entirely.
The NBA scrambles to catch up
Commissioner Adam Silver had been telegraphing a “national streaming RSN,” a bundled package of local team rights sold as one product to a streaming platform, with a target launch of 2027 to 2028. He called it a hybrid model, teams opting in to an aggregated package rather than negotiating alone. Main Street’s collapse didn’t just validate that plan. It forced the clock forward.
By March 2026, the NBA was in active talks with YouTube TV, Amazon Prime Video, ESPN and DAZN about a consolidated hub covering as many as 22 of the league’s 30 teams, with room to expand. Meanwhile the 13 orphaned franchises went shopping for one year bridge deals. Fubo, later acquired by Disney, offered $8 million to $20 million per team, then pulled every offer in May 2026 once it became clear the league’s centralized platform would undercut the economics. DAZN kept pursuing individual team deals and confirmed its interest in becoming the NBA’s centralized hub outright.
The one club that already ran this play is worth studying closely. When the New Orleans Pelicans left Main Street’s predecessor, they traded a cable footprint of about 700,000 homes for a broadcast TV deal with Gray Media reaching over 10 million homes across four states, paired with a direct to consumer app. Rights fees fell from roughly $25 million a year to an estimated $6 million. Reach went up fourteen times. Revenue went down four times. Every team weighing a post Main Street strategy is running that exact same trade in a spreadsheet right now, and every one of them is deciding how much brand reach is worth trading against how much cash they’re willing to give up to get it.
The niche players prove the model scales down, not just up
The interesting story isn’t only happening at the top of the market. It’s happening in the properties cable never bothered to carry at all.
On July 14, 2026, FloSports announced it had acquired U.S. rights to the IIHF Men’s World Championship, covering the main event plus the Division IA and IB tournaments. FloSports CEO Mark Floreani has been calling this “the golden age of streaming” since mid 2025, and the company is projecting more than $200 million in annual revenue off a portfolio built almost entirely from properties cable ignored: 18 Division II and III college conferences, the ECHL through a multiyear renewal, European rugby, and now international hockey.
This is the part of the migration people miss because it doesn’t generate a $77 billion headline. Streaming didn’t just win the fight for premium rights. It created an entirely new tier of the market where mid tier and international properties that traditional broadcast economics made invisible can now build a real, profitable, subscription funded business. That is a bigger structural change than any single mega deal, because it means the collapse of the RSN bundle didn’t shrink the sports media industry. It just redistributed who gets to participate in it.
The NHL’s turn, and why the timing hurts
The NHL lost seven teams in the Main Street collapse, the Wild, Predators, Red Wings, Kings, Hurricanes, Blue Jackets and Blues, all now free agents on the local media market, with DAZN already circling in conversations. The timing could not be worse. The league’s salary cap is set to climb roughly 9% a year for two straight seasons, from $95.5 million to $104 million to $113.5 million, which means seven franchises are trying to solve a local media crisis and a rising cost base in the exact same window.
Why the fans left first, and everyone else is just catching up
None of this happened because streaming platforms out negotiated cable. It happened because the audience moved and the money followed, in that order.
Gen Z is now more likely to stream live sports (32%) than watch them on traditional television (28%), a flat reversal of where the numbers sat a few years ago, and traditional TV captures just 28% of that generation’s sports viewing against 47% of adults overall. A league that insists on staying cable exclusive isn’t protecting revenue. It’s opting out of the next thirty years of its own audience.
Streaming platforms will pay premium prices for live sports because live sports are one of the only things left on earth that still creates appointment viewing and drives real time subscriber sign ups. That bidding pressure is what pushed rights values past anything cable could justify. And when a league or a team owns its own direct to consumer product, it owns something cable never gave it: a direct relationship with the fan, real viewership data, and the ability to bundle tickets, merchandise and betting into one experience instead of renting eyeballs to a cable operator who never told anyone who was actually watching.
The fine print: fragmentation, ad dollars and a competitive balance problem nobody’s solved
I’d be lying if I called this transition clean. It isn’t.
The average cord cutter now juggles a handful of on demand services, one or two live TV replacements, a sports add on, and a niche subscription or two, and the total monthly bill often rivals the cable bill they walked away from, just spread across a dozen logins. The industry’s answer is rebundling: NBCUniversal and Amazon struck a deal to sell Peacock through Prime Video Channels, which is a very polite way of saying the industry is quietly rebuilding the bundle it just spent a decade tearing apart.
The ad market hasn’t fully caught up either. S&P Global/Kagan projected linear TV advertising would fall 9.4% in 2025 to $32.97 billion, and streaming ad revenue, while growing fast, hasn’t replaced that volume yet, especially at the hyper local level where RSN advertising used to live.
And the competitive balance question is the one that should worry commissioners more than any of it. Baseball has the weakest revenue sharing structure of the major leagues and the highest dependency on local TV money. A Dodgers franchise pulling $196 million locally and a small market club navigating an unguaranteed, performance based MLB streaming split are not competing on the same field anymore, financially speaking, and the next CBA negotiation is going to be, in Attanasio’s word, “fierce”.
The read
I’ve sat on enough sides of enough deals to know the difference between a bad quarter and a broken model. This was never a bad quarter. Diamond and Main Street’s $9 billion debt wasn’t the disease. It was the symptom. The disease was a distribution model that taxed people who never opted in, and once they got the ability to opt out, the tax base disappeared. No amount of balance sheet surgery was going to fix that, and it didn’t.
What comes next is streaming first, fragmented for another year or two, and then it consolidates again, because it always does. The NBA’s national streaming hub, MLB’s ESPN backed in house infrastructure, the NHL’s post Main Street scramble, all of it points to the same place: a handful of premium streaming platforms doing what cable used to do, minus the tax, plus the data.
If I’m a team owner in a small or mid sized market right now, I’m not mourning the RSN check. I’m asking a harder question: who owns my fan relationship going forward, and what am I willing to give up in guaranteed cash to get it back. The teams that answer that clearly, the Pelicans’ playbook is as good a starting point as any, are going to out position the ones still waiting for someone else to rebuild the check they used to get for doing nothing.
The audience already left. The money is still packing its bags.
comunicanosports tracks the business of sport, technology, wine and travel from the operator’s seat, not the press box. For briefings, strategy or media commentary, reach Andy at aabramson@comunicano.com.
Sources: Adwave, S&P Global/Kagan, SportsPro, Sports Business Journal, ESPN, Front Office Sports, Sportico, CNBC, NBC News, Variety, Deseret News, The New York Times/The Athletic, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, MediaPost, Reuters, CNET, MLB.com, The Desk, National Today, ABC News, Axios, Channel News Asia and Tuneline.