Dish TV drops NESN from lineup
Dish TV customers in Connecticut will no longer be able to watch their favorite Boston sports teams after the company dropped New England Sports Network on Monday, the latest casualty in a power struggle between streaming services and regional sports networks.
Brian Neylon, group president for Dish TV, said Tuesday in a statement, “the current Regional Sports Network (RSN) model is fundamentally broken.”
The removal of NESN, a satellite TV service that carries Boston Red Sox and Bruins games as well as regional college sports, affects Dish TV customers across a six-state region.
“This model requires nearly all customers to pay for RSNs when only a small percentage of customers actually watch them,” Neylon said. “As the cost of these channels continues to escalate and a la carte viewing options become ever more accessible, we no longer think it makes sense to include them in our TV lineup.”
The Red Sox ownership team, Fenway Sports Group, has an 80 percent ownership stake in Watertown, Mass.based NESN. The remaining ownership stake is held by Delaware North, a Buffalo, N.Y., food service and hospitality company that owns Boston’s TD Garden and whose chairman, Jeremy Jacobs, owns the Bruins.
Casey Blossom, a NESN spokesperson said in a statement that “as Dish has recently done with every other regional sports network that has come up for renewal, they’ve made the decision to drop NESN and not provide subscribers with their local professional teams.”
“As Boston’s No. 1-rated primetime cable network for the last five years, it is unfortunate that Dish is deflecting responsibility for its decision to drop NESN and take away the programming that New England subscribers find most valuable: live Bruins and Red Sox games and local college sports,” Blossom said.
“We are very disappointed with this end result, which includes a corporate level mandate from Dish to dismantle a business model that we have successfully partnered on for 25 years. Moreover, they are unwilling to provide any viable offer for continued carriage, despite us providing our most favorable economic terms.”
She said NESN is the very last Regional Sports Network dropped by Dish.
“We hope that in good faith Dish will provide subscribers with a full refund for the valuable content that Dish has chosen to remove from its lineup,” Blossom said. “We hope Dish subscribers will decide to subscribe to one of the many other quality distributors that offer NESN.”
Neylon said Dish TV had “offered multiple solutions to keep NESN on Dish TV while providing the best value to all our customers.”
“We made an offer for NESN to be a separate standalone package, similar to premium channels like HBO or Showtime — they refused,” he said. “We also offered NESN to be part of select Dish programming packages, but they refused this as well.”
Dish TV, according to Neylon, remains open to working with NESN to offer content in a way that provides choice to customers.
Tuesday’s announcement is the latest example of the power struggle between cable television providers, streaming television companies and the sports channels that make up a significant portion of their content.
On April 1, Dish TV dropped MASN and NBC Regional Sports Networks were removed from its lineup, a move that affected access in 10 states and Washington D.C. The action removed Mid-Atlantic Sports Network as well as NBC Sports Washington, NBC Sports Bay Area and NBC Sports California from the Dish TV lineup.
Last weekend, YouTube TV removed Disney-owned sports channels like ESPN and Connecticut television station WTNH were removed from the streaming service Friday night. WTNH is owned by a Texas company, Nextstar Media Group, which is an affiliate of ABC, which is owned by Disney.
The two sides settled their dispute 24 hours later, but programming was not fully restored to YouTube TV customers in Connecticut until Sunday evening.
The power struggle between the media giants and regional sports networks has also resulted in cable TV giant Comcast removing MSG Network and YES Network from its Xfinity lineup. MSG telecasts games for New York City sports teams like the New York Knicks, New York Rangers and New Jersey Devils. YES Network’s programming includes the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Nets.
Comcast dropped the MSG Network and YES Network from XFinity at the end of September. NESN was dropped from YouTube TV in October 2020.
Rich Hanley, an associate professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University, said Dish TV’s dropping NESN from its lineup is yet another example of how sports and the business of broadcasting games “is total chaos.”
“It’s just a matter of time before it reaches a crisis point that will impact not just how the games are broadcast, but the teams themselves,” Hanley said. “The glory days when an RSN could fetch lots of dollars are gone. Streaming depends on scale to be successful and it’s difficult to build the kind of scale outside of the regions where the team is located.”
Networks like NESN are tied to teams they cover, he said.
“And unfortunately for them, the money to be made is providing the pipe to the internet,” Hanley said.
Teams with majority ownership stakes in Regional Sports Networks will soon find themselves with less money to sign top players, he said. Fans will see fewer games of their favorite teams, either in person or on television, Hanley said.
“The average fan doesn't have a seat at the table in these negotiations,” he said. “These teams are forgetting who put them where they are, whether is the people fannies are in the seats at the stadium or watching it on television from somebody’s couch. They are being greedy and showing the ultimate disregard for fans.”