Bally Sports and Comcast have reached an agreement after the RSNs went dark for nearly three months on the distributor.
The Bally Sports RSNs will return to Comcast’s airwaves on Thursday following nearly three months of dispute between the distributor and Bally parent company Diamond Sports Group, per multiple reports Monday. The agreement will see the dozen MLB franchises inked to Bally Sports deals once again become available to Comcast customers as the season enters its home stretch.
The deal comes at a crucial moment for Diamond, whose bankruptcy proceedings have hinged on reaching an agreement with Comcast, the company’s third largest distributor. With the Comcast deal being finalized, Diamond will now have reached agreements with 11 of its 12 largest distributors.
In many ways, the deal comes at the eleventh hour for Diamond, who was originally slated to appear in bankruptcy court on Monday but was granted an extension to afford the company time to work out an agreement with Comcast. The hang-up between the two sides centered around how the Bally Sports RSNs would be tiered on Comcast’s cable offerings. Diamond sought to keep the Bally Sports RSNs on a basic cable tier, while Comcast wished to include the channels in a premium tier. Ultimately, Comcast won the dispute, and Bally Sports RSNs will be included in the “Ultimate” tier for Comcast subscribers — about $20 per month higher than the basic tier.
While Diamond may have lost the tiering battle with Comcast, it is looking more and more likely that they could win the war and emerge out of bankruptcy. The company will now shift its focus towards securing agreements with the NBA and NHL prior to those seasons starting this fall.
Getting its RSNs back on Comcast airwaves certainly bodes well for Diamond, though there is still little clarity on how this ultimately gets resolved. Several former-Bally teams have taken matters into their own hands and nixed deals with Diamond in favor of local over-the-air distribution. Leagues like MLB have floated the possibility of pooling local rights for a national streaming service — should those rights be available. Such ideas would conceivably cause difficulties for Diamond’s efforts to reach deals with the leagues.
Nonetheless, Diamond’s current agreements with NBA, NHL, and MLB franchises offer a stability that is attractive to owners, and cannot yet be matched by digital or over-the-air deals. Should the Comcast agreement convince its creditors of the company’s long-term viability, Diamond may well remain a vital part of the local sports rights landscape.
