Baseball fans shouldn’t expect to stream games of their local teams anytime soon, The Post has learned.
Major League Baseball and regional sports networks remain far apart in their talks over rights to stream local games, sources said Tuesday.
The RSNs are offering roughly 13 cents per subscriber per month — while MLB is asking for about double that amount, sources said.
With about 70 million RSN homes, the gulf is about $109 million a year.
“It is a substantial gap,” one source said. “MLB is driving a very hard bargain.”
MLB, with adept planning and execution, was early to develop the pipes to stream its games — and has always owned all streaming rights.
Baseball sells about 1.5 million subscriptions a year — for as much as $130 a shot. However, all local games are blacked out.
As streaming of sports has become more commonplace — the NFL and NBA stream local games and national MLB games, like Tuesday night’s All-Star Game and the World Series are streamed — RSNs have been aching to get their hands on the rights.
“It’s crazy,” one source close to the talks said. “You can get the All-Star Game on Tuesday but in New York you can’t get the Yankees on Friday.”
Talks between the RSNs have been held — on and off — since before the season began. There was some hope in the spring that a deal would be hammered out by the All-Star Game — but that has not happened.
Without offering in-market games on tablets or cellular phones it makes it harder for baseball and RSNs — which are predominantly owned by Fox and Comcast — to build their audiences.
The offer by the RSNs is close to the 15 cents to 20 cents per subscriber per month ESPN started charging cable distributors a year ago for the newly launched WatchESPN app, the source said.
As more sports fans stream games, the opportunity for RSNs to increase not only sales revenue — some charge an extra fee for the service — but also ad revenue grows.
Fox, for example, aired different commercials when streaming the Super Bowl than were seen on TV.
Cable distributors are pushing RSNs for streaming rights.
“It is definitely a hole in the offering,” a source who negotiates cable contracts said. “It’s always a topic of conversation.”
The RSNs charge cable companies about $3.50 a subscriber, on average. If they get streaming rights, that prevailing rate will likely rise by more than 10 percent, sources said.
Most of these distributor contracts are now five-to-seven year deals, the cable negotiator said, and some of them would allow RSNs to pass through the costs of getting in-market streaming rights if it happens in the middle of a contract.
The big market MLB teams feel they can monetize digital more effectively and are generally hoping the RSNs get the rights so they can sell media rights deals to them for more money.
Comcast, Fox and MLB declined comment.