Charlie Jacobs, the CEO of hockey’s Boston Bruins, is convinced that his three children, all in their twenties, will likely never sign up for a traditional cable package to watch television. But his kids will certainly have WiFi in their homes, and through the internet, the ability to watch sports teams all the same.
For years, a central question in sports and media has been whether streaming subscribers, as Jacobs’ children would be, could ever drive enough revenue to fill sports stations’ tills. Now, some regional sports networks such as New England Sports Network, or NESN, are starting to see streaming numbers that make them believe.
NESN, which is owned by and carries both the Bruins and baseball’s Boston Red Sox, says its subscription revenue was up 55 percent in 2025 from the prior year, while digital ad revenue was up 71 percent.
“Certainly, cord-cutting is happening, but I’m not sure RSNs are going away,” Jacobs said. “In fact, I feel very different about that.”
Cord-cutting, where households get rid of cable and satellite packages, has roiled the sports world. TV providers, the cable and satellite companies, have seen revenues drop with fewer subscribers, which makes them less willing to pay big fees to carry sports stations. Some of those RSNs in turn are reluctant to pay sports teams top dollar for broadcast rights.
The problem has grown large enough that in Major League Baseball this year, the league itself has stepped in to handle broadcasts for 14 teams, nearly half the league. On Opening Day just three years ago, all of those teams had third-party broadcast partners.
A common refrain has cropped up to summarize the situation: RSNs are dying. But it might not be wholly accurate.
“The traditional model that’s based primarily on cable subscribers is dying,” said Lee Berke, a media consultant and president of LHB Sports, Entertainment and Media. “The flip side of that is RSNs can and will survive and do well if they pick up a multitude of screens where fans are now watching content.”
Most RSNs have tried to pivot by selling a direct-to-consumer (DTC) streaming service. Instead of signing up for a TV bundle like cable, fans pay to receive only their favorite team’s channel. NESN, for example, can be bought for $30 monthly, or $240 per year. But streaming historically hasn’t reproduced the revenues of traditional TV, and the money might never be fully replaced.
For decades, cable subscribers were a goldmine for RSNs and sports teams because folks who signed up for even basic TV packages were paying for sports channels whether they wanted them or not.
“You’re never going to substitute all the, I’ll call them ‘phantom subs,’ that you were getting from a regional sports network when you’re on cable,” Jacobs said. “But you are getting DTC numbers that are growing substantially, like a hockey stick almost, in particular in our market. As an example here for Boston, we’re up 92 percent in DTC subscribers from last year alone, and that’s a year-round subscriber.”
Does that mean the streaming money could start to look at least good enough?
“Before the 2025 season, the answer would have been to me, no,” said Craig Sloan, CEO of Playfly, a sports media and technology agency which works with RSNs to maximize ad inventory. “With the growth that happened last year and the overall last, let’s call it 18 months — and with what we expect to do this year as well — it’s getting to be a significant portion of the total consumption.
“We are clearly in a transitionary period where people are trying new things.”
Within the next few years, Sloan said streaming could account for more than half of local sports channels’ total viewership. Success, however, remains variable market to market.
NESN also operates an RSN in Pittsburgh which carries hockey’s Penguins and baseball’s Pirates.
“The Northeast Boston market is much more digitally targeted than, for example, the Pittsburgh market,” said NESN president David Wisnia. “It’s all about resource allocation, right? Boston, we put more resources into DTC, into marketing, into (personalized advertising) tech, than we will in Pittsburgh. So we’ll just play it differently, depending on what the opportunity is, depending on what the demo is.”
But as RSNs cut costs, learn to live with reduced rights fees and adapt to the habits of younger fans, some stations, including NESN, also have to contend with the prospect that they might soon have fewer games to broadcast.
National vs. local
In the race to revitalize sports teams’ media rights, RSNs face another threat: nationalization that shrinks local inventory.
Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred wants to sell more games nationally when he negotiates new league-level TV deals for 2029 and beyond. How many more games will be taken national isn’t yet known, but MLB’s belief is that big streaming companies will pay more than teams would otherwise make selling the same games locally.
“The good thing about this business, because it’s not that complicated, right — you make more from national games than you make from local games,” Manfred said in February. “I want to get into a paradigm where I can maximize the amount of national revenue that I get.”
This year, the maximum number of games MLB can take national from a given team’s 162-game schedule is 18. That number seems virtually guaranteed to increase in three years’ time.
“I think commissioner Manfred will be successful in garnering more games away from the local package, and be able to create a new model,” said Sloan, who added he hopes there will still be more than 100 games available locally. “There will be, I think, a push-pull on that for sure.”
MLB declined additional comment for this story.
Economics will play a big role in the discussion. Big-market teams such as the Red Sox and their station might prefer to keep as many games for themselves as possible. The proceeds from national games are split among all 30 clubs, but the income also might be higher overall.
But there’s an additional tension: how would fans be best served? Already, viewers across sports often lament the absence of their local broadcasters during national telecasts.
“Everybody’s trying to find what’s the right mix between national-local,” Wisnia said, “but nothing compares to local, at least as of today, right? National networks still can’t do the 24/7 marketing campaign that local broadcasters and regional sports networks can do. They don’t have the connective tissue that we’ve built over 40 years, for example, and that’s hard to replicate.
“It doesn’t mean you can’t have different models. You have to continue to evolve, given the challenges that exist today. It’s fluid.”
Another wrinkle is the concurrent possibility a streaming company scoops up a whole slew of local rights. If Manfred could bundle two-thirds of the league’s local rights or more — remember, it already has 14 clubs — it might be more lucrative than having each team reach a deal with a local RSN on its own.
But a key question in that scenario would be, what commitment would a major streaming company make to supplemental local content? Would it also invest in pre- and post-game shows, and offer in-depth magazine programming as RSNs have historically?
To Jacobs, regional channels are “the best brand representatives that we could possibly have.”
“They’re touching our customer base in the best way possible, and they’re sending our messages, information about our brands,” Jacobs said. “And so when you talk about a massive bundling, if you will, you lose that in the wash, in my opinion.”
Sloan says he’s frequently tried to tell teams and leagues that RSNs are the No. 1 vehicle for connecting with fans.
“More than going to games,” he said. “They’ll spend more minutes watching through these local outlets than they will on any national outlet, any sort of digital or print product, any audio, and any venue.
“So if this is your No. 1 consumption point, and you have three and a half hours to speak to your fans and promote new products and new ways to present your team, then I think this is mission critical for them to make sure that they have as many of those games produced locally.”
Nationalizing more games probably won’t make watching them any cheaper.
Ultimately, fans would like the easiest and least expensive options possible to follow their teams. The more networks the games are spread amongst, the more money fans have to shell out, and that problem has already rankled consumers. The Federal Communications Commission has recently taken an interest in the ever-growing costs.
Baseball has long been plagued by local “blackouts” — territorial broadcast exclusivity restrictions that make it unduly difficult for fans in certain markets to watch their teams. Manfred has long said he’d like to eliminate blackouts in coming years. But if games are spread out over a multitude of services, accessibility woes will persist, just in a different form.
“That’s the huge challenge for all of this,” Berke said. “Fans have fractionalized across a range of screens. Media outlets are eager to build their streaming revenues, their subscriptions, their ad sales, so they flock to sports. You’ve got sports leagues and entities that have to maximize their revenues to pay players, to build stadiums and arenas.
“You’re ending up not just going to one central source anymore, but you’re going to multiple sources. I realize it’s a major problem right now. It’s not going to be fixed immediately.”
Sloan said the more networks a sport appears on, the more potential exposure, tantamount to placing multiple bets on a craps table.
“That’s one side of the argument,” he said. “The other side is fans drive everything here, and so you want to keep them on your side. You want to make this easy on them, and you want to make a value exchange that is at an appropriate amount, where fans are not complaining.”
In baseball, many of these TV issues are going to come up directly and indirectly during the lockout that owners are expected to begin in December, when the sport’s labor deal expires.
In MLB, some teams appear to have cut payroll because of their local TV situation, which affects the quality of the team they field.
The owner of the Milwaukee Brewers told reporters recently that the team took a $20 million cut on its TV deal this year when it joined MLB’s broadcast ranks compared to what it expected for this year with its previous partner.
The Players Association declined comment for this story. Over time, the union has pointed out that TV money alone provides an incomplete picture of what clubs can spend. The union believes at least some teams have simultaneously enjoyed revenue gains in other areas, such as luxury tax proceeds, that balance out TV rights reductions.
Ultimately, the commissioner’s office is expected to propose a plan to distribute local media money more evenly between teams. But that’s a politically charged undertaking that requires owners and players alike to be on board.
Large-market owners are unlikely to agree to a rebalancing unless they receive adequate compensation for their valuable local rights. Adding a salary cap to the sport could be adequate persuasion, but players have long opposed a cap.
In revenue-sharing debates, then, media rights will be front and center as the players and owners try to work out a new labor contract. Revenue sharing has to be collectively bargained with the players.
A lockout that costs regular season games in 2027 would not help the momentum for the RSNs that sense they’re headed in the right direction.
Wisnia said the Red Sox last year drew their best ratings on NESN since 2019.
“In the year and a half I’ve been here, the focus has truly been on reinventing the business a little bit, from the cost basis to the revenue opportunities, to how best do we tell our story,” Wisnia said. “Ratings are up across the board.”
