MITCH HORUCY
Asst. Sports Editor
Gotham Sports, Hulu, ESPN+ and Max subscriptions cost a grand total of roughly $670 per year.
That’s the amount someone living in Buffalo would have to pay in order to be able to watch every Buffalo Sabres game this season.
This may sound ridiculous, because it is. However, it has become the new norm in this age of streaming.
An example of another sport with this issue is baseball, specifically the MLB.
They have MLB.TV, a website where you can watch every MLB game being played.
However, fans may be upset when they see some of the games may be “blacked out,” which is a term sports fans have become familiar with. This is when the broadcast of a game isn’t shown due to a multitude of reasons. These could be protecting the team’s home territory, encouraging fans to attend games or just fulfilling a television contract.
In Buffalo, the following teams have games blacked out and can only be watched on the teams’ local streams: the New York Yankees, New York Mets, Cleveland Guardians and the Pittsburgh Pirates.
This means that if you lived in Buffalo and wanted to watch, for example, the Mets play the Philadelphia Phillies, you’d have to pay for the local broadcast plan.
Keep in mind, the Mets play six hours from Buffalo, and the Phillies are eight hours away.
Another great display of craziness is the MLB and the state of Iowa.
Six teams claim Iowa as “home territory.” Those teams are: the Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, St. Louis Cardinals, Kansas City Royals, Minnesota Twins and the Milwaukee Brewers.
So someone living in the state with MLB.TV would have games for all six of those teams blacked out.
A last example from a different league is the NBA, which is really struggling with viewership.
Some of the talk about declining viewership has been overdone, but the league has seen a 5% decrease in viewership compared to last year.
Similarly to the MLB, the NBA has NBA League Pass, a paid service that gives you access to every NBA game.
However, blackout rules are once again applied.
Relating it back to Buffalo again, even with League Pass, you’d still need to pay for the local broadcast to watch New York Knicks and Brooklyn Nets games.
While people will point to the decrease in things such as too many 3-pointers, load management and too long of a season, I think the answer is much more simple.
It’s too hard to watch games.
Going hand-in-hand with games being more difficult to watch is the decline of cable television.
In 2019, 84 million households had cable.
In 2024, that number is down to 40.8 million.
On the other hand, the number of households with digital pay TV was at 10.4 million in 2019.
That number is now at 22 million as of last year.
Before the rise of streaming, games on cable were much easier to access. Also, streaming-only games were unheard of.
The NBA does have nationally televised games almost daily, but that isn’t enough.
A good example is the Knicks. They have 34 nationally televised games, good for third-most in the league.
However, that’s still less than half their games, about 41% to be exact.
An easy fix would be to buy NBA League Pass and be able to watch the other 48 games, but unfortunately this isn’t the case.
Living in Buffalo, or really anywhere in New York, you’d have to specifically buy the Knicks local TV package, which is MSG.
The fix isn’t simple at all which makes things harder, but if every major sports league besides the NFL wants to find out how to fix viewership, making the games more accessible is a great start.