Major League Baseball hopes to build ratings momentum going into the World Series with a strong performance from TBS’s telecast of the deciding Game 7 of the National League Championship Series between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Philadelphia Phillies.

With both the Diamondbacks-Phillies series and the American League Championship series between the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros having gone to a deciding Game 7, baseball hopes to salvage a lackluster ratings performance so far in the playoffs. 

Fox and FS1's October 23 Rangers-Astros Game 7 telecast averaged 6.77 million viewers, topping only the 2020 Astros-Tampa Bay Rays Game 7 as the least-watched LCS Game 7 on record, according to SportsMedia Watch. Overall, the series averaged 5 million viewers, down from last year's four-game Astros-Yankees series on TBS, but the most watched LCS on Fox and FS1 since 2019's Astros-Yankees series, according to Nielsen numbers provided by Fox Sports. 

Fox’s October 15 Rangers-Astros Game 1 was the most-watched game of the series with 7.05 million viewers. 

TBS's October 23 Diamondbacks-Phillies Game 6 afternoon telecast averaged 4.6 million viewers, according to SportsMedia Watch. With tonight's Game 7 still to be played, TBS’s October 20 Phillies-Diamondbacks Game 4 is currently the most-watched game of the series with 5.39 million viewers, according to SportsMedia Watch.

Total viewing for the opening Wild Card rounds across ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 were down 18%, according to Nielsen data, with the four two-game sweeps averaging 2.25 million viewers vs. 2.73 million last season. 

The Division Series round on Fox/FS1 and TBS — where none of the four series went to a fifth and deciding game — averaged 3.13 million viewers, down 8% from last year (3.40 million), according to Nielsen.

Baseball’s Houston Astros and the NBA’s Houston Rockets have acquired AT&T SportsNet Southwest from Warner Bros Discovery and will relaunch the channel Tuesday as the “Space City Home Network.” 

The move completes the media conglomerate's exit from the regional sports networks (RSN) business, reluctantly foisted upon WBD when it, in turn, foisted the highly leveraged merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery upon all of us 18 months ago. 

Last month, WBD sold AT&T SportsNet Pittsburgh to Fenway Sports Group, owner of the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins. 

Earlier, WBD announced the abandonment of AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain, which had been the RSN home of the NBA's Utah Jazz and NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights. (Both teams have announced local broadcast TV deals and new DTC streaming platforms.)

As for the rebranded Space City Home Network, the Rockets and Astros say little will change in terms of the channel's operations and positioning on the pay TV grid (it currently has distribution via Comcast, DirecTV and Fubo). General manager David Peart will remain in charge of the network.

No financial terms of the acquisition from WBD were disclosed. 

“It’s not something that I would have bet on [in 2014],” Astros general counsel Giles Kibbe told the Houston Chronicle. “But as things started changing … it’s something we’ve had our eyes on. Owning our media rights and having the ability to control those rights is extremely important to both the Astros and Rockets.” 

The Rockets and Astros will be looking to expand revenue through increased distribution, hoping to gain carriage via cable operators including Charter Communications and Altice, as well as virtual MVPD YouTube TV. 

They're also looking at direct-to-consumer streaming. 

“We are looking at the direct-to-consumer model,” Kibbe told the Chronicle. “It’s something that we are seeing in a few regional sports networks. It is going to take some work to make that happen. But it is something that we will look at and evaluate.”

Back in February, Warner Bros. Discovery told its professional sports team partners that it wanted to divest the three AT&T SportsNet regional sports networks it reluctantly inherited amid the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery. 

Seven months later, a clearer exit strategy has emerged, as outlined by Sports Business Journal's John Ourand.

WBD has agreed to sell AT&T SportsNet Pittsburgh to Fenway Sports Group, which owns one of the channel’s anchor tenants, the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins. 

WBD is also in talks to sell AT&T SportsNet Houston to that channel’s foundational teams, the NBA's Houston Rockets and Major League Baseball's Houston Astros. 

AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain, which recently saw the NBA’s Utah Jazz and NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights depart to local-station broadcast TV deals, will shutter. 

WBD will, however, retain a sliver of skin in the fast-declining RSN business, serving as 29% owner of Seattle’s Root Sports Network, with that channel’s principal team, baseball’s Seattle Mariners, being the majority owner. 

The moves clarify WBD's exit from the RSN business, but plenty of questions remain for the numerous individual teams involved. 

Fenway Sports Group, for example, operates one of the more profitable RSNs still around, New England Sports Network (NESN). And SBJ says it's likely that SportsNet Pittsburgh will launch a direct-to-consumer streaming service around the Penguins, much as NESN has around its tenants, the MLB's Boston Red Sox and NHL's Boston Bruins. 

We could be witnessing the emergence of a powerful go-to sports streaming technology shop in regard to the Ted Leonis-backed ViewLift, which last week announced that it will be handling the tech for the Vegas Golden Knights’ new DTC venture. It was also reported at the time that ViewLoft would likely take on the Penguins’ DTC effort, as well.

Meanwhile, two MLB teams under the AT&T SportsNet umbrella, the Pittsburgh Pirates and Colorado Rockies, will be searching for new RSN homes once baseball's regular season ends next month. 

The Pirates have the option of cutting a deal with Fenway, or the team could follow the path carved out by MLB rivals the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks, which were both abandoned by Bally Sports operator Diamond Sports Group when the subsidiary went into Chapter 11 restructuring earlier this year. 

Both the Padres and the Diamondbacks chose to let Major League Baseball set them up with pay TV production and distribution for new channels operated by the league itself. SBJ said these channels pay the teams revenue adding up to about 80% of what they were getting with their old Bally Sports contracts.

The Rockies have the same MLB option, but the team reportedly can also choose to move over to the Stan Kroenke-backed Altitude Sports, home of the NBA defending champion Denver Nuggets and NHL's Colorado Avalanche. 

The Rockies are viewed by some as a critical addition that might convince Comcast to finally reintegrate the Altitude RSN back into its program guide after dumping the channel four years ago. 

A federal appeals court has sent back a five-year-old bankruptcy case involving the Comcast Sports Network Houston regional sports network for re-evaluation, noting in a ruling March 29 that the former partners in the channel may owe Comcast more than $54 million.

CSN Houston was formed in 2012 by Major League Baseball’s Houston Astros, the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets and Comcast to air contests from the two teams to customers in the Houston region. But the channel, which reportedly was seeking carriage fees of $3.40 per customer per month – had been unable to secure distribution from other providers outside of Comcast and a few small cable operators. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2013. 

News of the ruling was first reported by the Houston Chronicle. The network was sold to AT&T-DirecTV in 2014 and now operates under the AT&T SportsNet Southwest banner. AT&T and DirecTV are not part of the bankruptcy and the most recent ruling has no impact on the network, which continues to carry Astros and Rockets games.

The win, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, means that the case will be sent back to U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Marvin Isgur, who will hold another hearing to determine whether Comcast is owed the balance of its loan or if the teams can successfully persuade the court that the cable operator is owed nothing. No date has been set for the hearing as yet.

Since the bankruptcy in 2013, the Astros have gone on to win the World Series in 2017. Leslie Alexander, who owned the Rockets at the time, sold the basketball team in 2017 to billionaire restaurant, hotel and casino owner Tilman Fertitta for $2.2 billion. Alexander remains a party to the bankruptcy case.

Comcast did not respond to a request for comment, but the Astros, in a statement to the Houston Chronicle, said they were disappointed with the appellate court ruling.

“We will address this valuation issue with the Court at the appropriate time and we will continue to pursue all of our claims against Comcast," the Astros told the Chronicle.

The Astros filed a separate suit against Comcast claiming the cable operator breached its contract for the network by making false statements that resulted in the bankruptcy and the loss of the teams’ rights fees. 

The bankruptcy of CSN Houston was big news in 2013 because it was one of the few documented failures of a large cable regional sports network, which up until that time had been perennial cash cows for operators and teams alike. Comcast, which had put up a $100 million secured loan to help launch the network in 2012, had tried to get most of that investment back.

The Astros owned the biggest chunk of the network (46.5%), followed by the Rockets (31.5%) and Comcast (22%). The teams lost their equity when the network filed for bankruptcy, and Comcast received what was then determined to be the value of the channel’s tangible assets, about $26.2 million.

Isgur had valued the Comcast agreement at $54.3 million and then subtracted from that the value of the unpaid rights fees, which was determined to be about $107 million and also used as collateral for the $100 million loan. That rendered the value of the deal at less than zero.

That’s where the appellate court ruled Isgur went wrong.

“…we remand for a re-valuation of the Agreement because the bankruptcy court failed to value the collateral in light of its proposed use when it deducted all unpaid media fees from the value of the Agreement,” Circuit Judge Priscilla Owen wrote in the March 29 ruling. “The bankruptcy court erred in deducting the Teams’ unpaid, waived media fees from the value of Comcast’s collateral.”

Last night’s Houston Astros-Los Angeles Dodgers World Series Game Seven telecast on Fox hit a social media home run, generating more than 26 million online interactions according to Nielsen.

The Astros’ 5-1 victory over the Dodgers to win a thrilling World Series drew a whopping 26.1 million interactions across Facebook and Twitter from 8 million unique social media accounts, according to Nielsen’s Social Content Ratings Daily List.

ESPN Deportes and FS1’s UEFA Champions League Soccer coverage drew 303,000 interactions to finish a distant second. 

On the entertainment front, the CW’s Riverdale was the most talked about series on Tuesday with 157,000 social media interactions, according to Nielsen.

UPDATE:No Game, No Talks Between YES, Comcast

Barring a last minute — and unlikely — reprieve, the Opening Day games of two of the most popular teams in Major League Baseball — the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers — will be dark to more than 1 million pay TV customers on April 4.

The ongoing big-market disputes are a sign that perhaps sports programming, once thought to be bulletproof, is weakening in the era of skinny bundles and over-the-top video.

Comcast in November refused to pay what it called a 33% increase in fees charged by YES Network, the New York-area RSN that features most Bronx Bombers games. Comcast’s customers missed out on Brooklyn Nets National Basketball Association games, but many thought the operator would cave in by the start of the baseball season. YES, owned by Fox Sports Network Group and the Yankees, was carried in about 900,000 Comcast homes in parts of New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

L.A. FADEAWAY

Time Warner Cable’s SportsNet LA, home to the Dodgers, continues to be spurned by distributors in Southern California including AT&T, DirecTV and Cox Communications. Time Warner Cable, which carries the RSN in L.A. along with Charter Communications and Bright House Networks, even agreed to offer a one-year discount — later extended to six years — and was still rejected.

Distributors have complained about the high cost of sports programming for years, but as sports rights charges have climbed and fees for networks have hit the stratosphere, pay TV providers are pushing back.

Some analysts say sports programming, once thought to be must-have content because of its live viewing nature and predominantly young male audience, is vulnerable as operators attempt to create “skinny” bundles for price-conscious customers.

“Clearly, there’s an appetite for a lower-cost package with less sports programming,” Telsey Advisory Group media analyst Tom Eagan said.

Comcast executive vice president of consumer services Marcien Jenckes said he sees the YES dispute in simper terms: the operator’s perception of the value of the network doesn’t match the price. Comcast has claimed that its customers in the New York market aren’t big YES watchers and haven’t much missed the channel since it came off on Nov. 18.

At $5.93 per month per subscriber, according to SNL Kagan, YES is the priciest RSN in the country — and at about $2.50 per subscriber per month higher than another New York area RSN, MSG Network, according to Kagan.

“At a more reasonable price, they would be a great value proposition,” Jenckes said.

YES CEO Tracy Dolgin has taken Comcast’s argument to task. He said YES programming is rated No. 1 in Comcast’s New York area territories on game days. And he said YES also out-rated SNY, partly owned by Comcast, by a margin of 5 to 1 in its Connecticut footprint on game days.

About 40% of Comcast’s 900,000 subscribers in the New York area consider themselves Yankees fans, Dolgin said.

YES: RATE WAS NO SURPRISE

While Comcast has said it is looking for a lower price, Dolgin noted the operator had been paying the higher rate for more than eight months — its deal originally expired in February. Dolgin said it is misleading to say a price that it has been paying for nearly a year is suddenly too high.

Dolgin said that other RSNs vary in price depending on the market; operators on the fringes of a team’s territory usually pay less than those in the heart of the market. YES does not have so-called zoned pricing like others do, including Comcast-owned RSNs.

“What we charge for YES is less than what Comcast charges for some of their owned-and-operated regional sports networks in the intermarket where the Comcast subs are,” Dolgin said, calling the Kagan estimate “way over” what Comcast was paying.

YES will keep running ads urging Comcast customers to switch providers, Dolgin said.

“It’s not easy, but Yankee fans are very passionate. In the month of April there are 23 Yankee games and 20 are exclusively on the YES Network. If you’re a Yankee fan, you either feel like a victim, or you switch.”

Last night’s Chicago Cubs-Pittsburgh Pirates Wild Card telecast drew a record 8.3 million viewers, breaking the viewership mark set 24 hours earlier.  

TBS’ National League Wild Card telecast upended the 7.3 million viewers ESPN generated for its Tuesday night New York Yankees-Houston Astros American League Wild Card telecast, according to Nielsen.

The game, which the Cubs won 4-0 over the Pirates, is also the most watched baseball game on cable since the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals-Philadelphia Phillies NL Division series game drew 8.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen.

Wednesday’s NL Wild Card Game also delivered double-digit increases across Turner’s TV Everywhere platforms with live streaming coverage up 58% among unique visits, 23% in total minutes consumed and 15% in live video starts.

Tuesday night’s Houston Astros-New York Yankees American League Wild Card baseball telecast on ESPN drew a record 7.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen Fast Nationals.

The game, in which the Astros defeated the Yankees 3-0, was the most watched Wild Card game ever, besting the 5.5 million viewers generated by ESPN’s 2014 San Francisco-Pittsburgh Pirates National League Wild Card contest.

Last night’s telecast was up 46% over last year’s Kansas City Royals-Oakland A's AL Wild Card telecast, which drew 5.2 million viewers, according to ESPN.

The Astros-Yankees game also generated the largest audience for an MLB game ever on WatchESPN, setting records across metrics, including 445,000 unique viewers, an average minute audience of 127,000 viewers, and 25.7 million total minutes viewed across devices, said the network.

Comcast attorneys will meet with a U.S. District Court judge on Wednesday seeking an emergency stay as it looks to reverse a bankruptcy court decision allowing the sale of its regional sports network in Houston to DirecTV and AT&T.

The cable company, whose NBC Sports Group has operated Comcast Sports Net Houston, is slated for a  hearing with judge Lynne Hughes on Nov. 5. Comcast, if the stay is not granted, is also expected to make an immediate appeal with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the CSN Houston reorganization plan, which calls for DirecTV and AT&T to purchase the embattled service with the former operating it under its Root Sports umbrella.

On Oct. 30, bankruptcy court judge Marvin Isgur approved a plan supported by MLB’s Houston Astros and the NBA’s Houston Rockets. Isgur reorganization would result in the teams and Comcast losing their equity positions in the RSN, which has been under Chapter 11 protection since September 2013.

The plan calls for AT&T, DirecTV and Comcast to carry the rebranded service, with an eye toward Roots Sports Houston tipping off on Nov 14.

Comcast deems Isgurs ruling “unlawful in several ways,” notably in that the MSO is not allowed to receive full payment of a $100 million secured loan that was used by the RSN for start-up costs, a studio build-out and early right fees payments to the clubs.

Launched in October 2012, CSN Houston never gained distribution traction beyond Comcast and a handful of smaller providers in the Houston DMA, and, as such, was unable to pay rights fees and meet other expense obligations.