"On October 1, Hulu and YouTube TV dropped Monumental Sports Network, the primary rightsholder and broadcaster for the Washington Capitals, from their streaming services. Overnight, hundreds of thousands of viewers in the DMV region lost access to all Capitals games not carried by national outlets."
"The disruption has been significant, and fans have not been quiet about it. "The greed you're showing is disgusting," one person replied to Ted Leonsis on X. "This is ridiculous. The fan has to suffer as billionaires fight over money," said another. Caps audiences have implored Leonsis to make a deal with Hulu and YouTube TV to get Monumental back on their platforms, but the blocker in negotiations isn't the ownership group's greed. The problem is the consolidation of power by a handful of mega-corporations - all orders of magnitude bigger than Monumental Sports - who control what you watch and how."
"The long, slow decline of cable TV YouTube TV and Hulu are internet streamers, but the story begins on cable. The peak of cable TV was June 2001, when 88.3 million American households had a traditional TV subscription. Since then, the rise of the internet, a battery of economic crises, and COVID have all steadily eaten away at that number. Estimates vary, but the market may have contracted by as much as 40 percent."
"Local sports coverage used to be a staple of cable programming. Madison Square Garden Network, the first regional sports network, or RSN, has been around for half a century. The RSN covering the Washington Capitals goes back almost as far. That lineage began with Home Team Sports (HTS) in the early 1980s. In 2001, the DMV's now-predominant cable provider, Comcast, bought HTS outright, turning it into Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic, an RSN owned and operated by its namesake distributo"
Hulu and YouTube TV removed Monumental Sports Network on October 1, cutting hundreds of thousands of DMV viewers off from most Washington Capitals games. Fans reacted angrily online, accusing owners of greed, but negotiations are impeded by concentrated distribution power. A handful of mega-corporations control carriage and access, leveraging scale against smaller regional broadcasters. Traditional cable peaked in June 2001 and has since contracted substantially due to the internet, economic crises, and COVID. Regional sports networks evolved from long-standing local channels and have lost negotiating leverage amid the shift toward streaming dominance.
Read at RMNB
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]