In 2012 I started a new job that came with a territory in
southern Wisconsin. Although I live in northern Illinois only 12 miles from the
border, the nearest site for this job is about 50-55 minutes away. The furthest
site, although small and only requiring a handful of on-site visits per month,
is 2.5 hours away. Over the years I've lost track of how many times people have
asked me why I don't move to the Janesville or Madison (Wisconsin) area to cut
down on the commute. There are a handful of reasons, but chiefly among those is
that I like watching live Chicago sports on TV and that moving would put those
games out of market for me. This would mean that to watch the White Sox, Cubs,
Bulls, and Blackhawks on TV, I'd have to buy NBA League Pass ($14.99/month),
NHL Center Ice ($69.99 for the season), and MLB TV (Single Team package running
about $119.99). In addition, I'd need a regular cable or satellite package to
keep other sports staples like NHL Network, ESPN, MLB Network, NBA TV, NHL
Network, TNT, and FS1. Factor in that I'm a fan of an out-of-market NFL team
(the Kansas City Chiefs) and can't do without NFL Sunday Ticket (at a cost of
about $350 for the season), and you can see why remaining in Illinois just
makes a little bit more sense.
From about 2015 until 2021, it was the golden age of a Chicago sports fan living in Winnebago County--millions of sports fans living in Cook, Lake, McHenry, Kane, DuPage, and Will counties can't relate to this. WCIU, Channel 26 in Chicago, had previously carried numerous Sox, Hawks, Cubs, and Bulls games from WGN Channel 9 all through the early 2000s until 2015. The games were only available in the Chicagoland area, and Winnebago County is still considered "Out of Market" for those games, which meant they were blacked out. We couldn't watch them even with a paid satellite subscription (I estimate I was probably paying $140/month for DirecTV at the time). To complicate this issue and make it 10x more asinine, even if I had been willing to subscribe to an MLB or NHL streaming service, the Blackhawks and White Sox games would still be blacked out on those packages because for some inconveniently stupid reason, I would have been considered "In-Market" according to the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball. So I was blacked out either way. In 2015 WCIU stopped airing games and all Sox, Hawks, and Bulls games were exclusively aired on Comcast Sports, which eventually became NBC Sports Chicago. The regional sports network (RSN) was picked up by every major carrier I know of, including DirecTV, XFinity, and YoutubeTV, and games were readily available for around $80-100 per month. Being that NFL Sunday Ticket was exclusive to DirecTV, I was bound to pay a little more for satellite, about $140 as previously mentioned.
I remember embarrassingly explaining this to co-workers when I told them the reason I didn't want to live in Wisconsin. I needed my Chicago sports and I was happily handing over $140/mo plus $360/yr for Sunday Ticket. It wasn't even a choice I had free will to even make. I was doing it. No questioning it whatsoever. Living without the Blackhawks and White Sox was simply not an option. It was a life I wanted no part of living.
I'm old enough to remember that in the mid-80s the White Sox unsuccessfully experimented with Pay-Per-View baseball games. I was born in 1980, but according to stories my dad told me, the White Sox were the more popular baseball team in Chicago in the 1960s and 70s. The games were aired nationally on WGN. In the 80s when Jerry Reinsdorf became chairman and instituted PPV, the Cubs stayed on national TV and drew an audience of tens of millions while the Sox lost millions of viewers in Illinois alone. Thankfully SportsVision, as Reinsdorf and his partners named it, was short lived and games were once again aired on cable in the late 1980s all the way until the early 2000s when WCIU started picking up several games per month.
The Blackhawks, too, partook in an economic strategy that alienated viewers and drove fans away. Long-time owner "Dollar Bill" Wirtz refused to air any home games on TV and also experimented with "HawkVision," a PPV channel for broadcasting Blackhawks games, in the early and mid-90s. When he died and his son took over operations in 2009, one of Rocky Wirtz' first orders of business was to air all Blackhawks games on Comcast SportsNet (CSN, the pre-cursor to NBC Sports Chicago).
Nowadays there are so many streaming services competing for exclusive rights to broadcast local and national sports that it's become overwhelming. In 2022 AppleTV began exclusively airing certain MLB games. Amazon Prime got exclusive rights to all Thursday Night Football games in 2023, and that same year the NFL also gave Peacock exclusive rights to a regular season and one post-season game. I had to steal a friend's password to Peacock just so I didn't have to miss the Chiefs-Dolphins Wild Card game. ESPN+ has exclusivity for certain Monday Night football games and many NHL and NBA games in 2024. And for 2024, Netflix paid $150 million for exclusive rights to broadcast TWO NFL games on Christmas Day. It's officially out of control.
It's not going to get any better, either. In fact, it literally can only get worse. Apple, Amazon, NBC (owner of Peacock), Disney (owner of ESPN), and Netflix are all multi-billion dollar businesses and there are dozens of smaller guys chomping at the bit to get a piece of this industry. I don't see it ever going back to "the good old days" of a $80/mo cable package getting you all the live sports you ever wanted.
It's only a matter of time before the NFL adds a weekly Friday game that Netflix will pay out the ass for. AppleTV is going to keep adding more and more MLB games, and it won't surprise me at all if they get into the NFL ring somehow. Who knows? I predict there could be a Super Bowl exclusively aired on one of these streaming networks in the near future. Would Apple be willing to outbid NBC, Fox, and CBS, who each pay $3 BILLION (with a B) to the NFL to exclusively broadcast the Super Bowl each season? Why the fuck wouldn't they? And if they would, why would the NFL say no?
It wasn't that long ago I was paying the $140/mo for DirecTV plus the $360/yr for Sunday Ticket and had every single NFL game for the entire season. Now I need to pay $139 for Amazon Prime, $7/mo for Netflix, $7.99/mo for Peacock, and $11.99/mo for ESPN+ in addition to my $75/mo for YoutubeTV.
Max (the name HBO gives their streaming service) has added NHL and NBA games within the past couple of years, but the games are still also available on TNT and TBS so it's not an exclusive deal. Don't you think they want to pay a little more to get exclusive rights to those games and/or others? Everybody wants in on the NFL. It's too profitable. Hulu, Paramount Plus, Fubo, and Sling probably all want to slide in, too.
If the NFL would air a Chiefs playoff game exclusively on Peacock, I don't think the NCAA would hesitate for a damn second to sell exclusive March Madness games to some high bidder. You want to watch the Rose Bowl? You better pay for Peacock. Your team made the NBA Finals? You better pay for Paramount+ or your not watching the games.
Once again, It's never going back again. It's never going to get better or cheaper or more convenient. It's only going to get harder and more expensive and more inconvenient.
Marquee Network began exclusively airing all Cubs games in 2020. At the time I was a DirecTV subscriber but when I switched to YoutubeTV in 2023 in order to get access to NFL Sunday Ticket, I forfeited any privilege I had to watch live Cubs games because Youtube does not carry Marquee Network. I never thought Chicago's other three sports teams would be stupid enough remove access to live games for their fans like Jerry Reinsdorf and Bill Wirtz tried in the 1980s. But alas, here we are...
As of October 1, 2024, NBC Sports Chicago no longer exists
and all White Sox, Bulls, and Blackhawks games are now on the brand new Chicago
Sports Network (CHSN), which is exclusive only to DirecTV. Almost nobody in the
Chicagoland area has DirecTV anymore, mostly due to it's outrageous price and
unreliable service relative to cable or streaming networks, meaning millions of
sports fans in Illinois can no longer watch these three teams without an RSN,
and the only way to get the RSN is to switch packages, which may mean you give
something else up. In my case, for example, I'm not willing to go without NFL
Sunday Ticket, a YoutubeTV exclusive. So my options are either pay an obscene
amount of money for both (Youtube and DirecTV), or forego one of them. Being that the Cubs created
Marquee four years ago and Youtube still doesn't carry that, it is highly
unlikely they will ever carry CHSN.
Within a few weeks after the launch of CHSN, and taking note of current trends, I can see what's about to happen and I'm not going to play the game. I'm bowing out. I'm going to keep paying for YoutubeTV and NFL Sunday Ticket for as long as Patrick Mahomes remains a Kansas City Chief--I'm kind of pot committed here and they don't look like they are going to stop providing high quality entertainment any time soon. He'll retire in about 10 years and there's a really high probability that at that time, having gone a decade without hockey, basketball, or baseball, I'll have lost any and all interest in the Chicago teams I never thought I could live without. So I'll cancel YoutubeTV and be done with sports. I'm not going to continue to jump through hoops and pay more money as all these streaming networks compete to take bigger and bigger bites out of the apple, and for every NFL game aired on ESPN+ or Netflix, it devalues the Sunday Ticket more and more. And do you think Youtube is going to start charging less because fewer games are being aired on Sunday? LOL...
If I pay for a package that includes CHSN just to watch the Blackhawks and Bulls, it's only a matter of time before Amazon gets exclusive Friday night NBA games and Peacock gets Hockey Night in Canada, meaning my RSN loses value, too. Fuck it. I quit.
There are ways around it, sure. But I want to watch the games how I'm accustomed to watching the games: In 4k on my 65" TV with surround sound, not through some illegal stream on my phone with choppy video and Spanish commentators. As more and more networks cut down on password sharing (ala Netflix) that's going to make things harder in the future.
It's only been a little over a month since I found out that Chicago Sports Network is a DirecTV exclusive and I won't be watching any Blackhawks or Bulls games this season and I've already noticed a drastically diminished interest in sports. Six months ago I would have been ecstatic about a Yankees-Dodgers World Series, but I legit only found enough time to watch about 40 pitches (of Game 3) and didn't even have the games on in the background while I did whatever else I was doing during that time. I've chosen to play video games instead of watch Sunday Night Football for the past three weeks straight. I haven't watched a single down of college football, and I'm typing this blog post right now instead of watching NFL Sunday.
I just can't continue being a fan when sports are becoming too expensive and too inconvenient to watch.