re: DAT Off-season Thread: YWCHA Edition

quote:

---

Warner Bros. Discovery has told teams that it plans to exit the regional sports network business entirely within the next several weeks. The company has told teams that they have until March 31 to reach an agreement to take their rights back. If the RSNs can’t reach deals with the teams, the channels eventually plan to move forward with a Chapter 7 liquidation filing.

Over the past several months, league sources privately have praised WBD Sports’ RSN leadership, led by AT&T SportsNet President Patrick Crumb, for working with the teams to come up with a plan that would enable the company to get out of the RSN business.

In the letters, WBD said that it will allow the teams to use the same production staff and equipment to continue producing the games.

---

LINK

Possibly. Bit of a different situation though. Bally is likely headed to bankruptcy with a massive amount of debt. I would think that's a bit of a drawn out situation involving creditors and MLB executing a termination clause to take back rights etc.

As I interpret the Sportsnet situation, they're giving the teams (or the league) until March 31st to absorb operations of the networks or they'll move forward with liquidation of the network assets. If this happened without prior notice, that's an impossible amount of time to absorb operations.

I'm pretty sure the teams knew this was coming. I'm expecting Crane and company to be ready to take over operation. A lot of it is just retaining the current production people and signing their paychecks.

I'll be interested to see if this all eventually means the return of some OTA game broadcasts on weekends for product exposure. You can buy every Astros games through MLB.TV while some will show up on Saturday and Sunday afternoons on local non-network channels in the region (ones that carry the CW or ION, for example).

Everybody pack your shite. It's moving day