ST. LOUIS — Despite months of uncertainty about the future of St. Louis Cardinals broadcasting, fans will be able to view the games exactly as they did last year when the team’s new season begins Thursday.
Indeed, the current TV arrangement could continue into 2025 and beyond — depending on decisions made by the Houston bankruptcy court shepherding Diamond ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Group through Chapter 11 proceedings.
But even if Diamond, the parent company of Cardinals broadcaster Bally ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Midwest, gets approval for its recent proposal to emerge from bankruptcy and continue broadcasting professional sports, changes in how to watch the Cardinals still are almost certainly on the horizon.
The Cardinals are eager to give fans more ways to access games. And the business model on which many professional teams rely for broadcasting was developed decades ago, when tens of millions more U.S. households subscribed to cable television.
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“We’re in this transition period, where the business is changing and we’re trying to sort of reinvent the distribution model,†Cardinals President Bill DeWitt III said.
The industry will have to move fast enough to serve the growing number of fans who want to watch games on streaming platforms and mobile devices — without moving so fast as to jeopardize the revenue they still depend on from cable subscribers.
“You’ll never totally discard the traditional TV,†said Patrick Rishe, executive director of the sports business program at Washington University. “You’re always going to have some people who want to consume it that way. But every network has now realized: ‘We need to diversify and be able to provide something for everybody.’â€
DeWitt said he’s confident that no matter the outcome of Diamond’s bankruptcy, the next few years can yield better viewing options for fans.
“Regardless of what happens, I think access to Cardinals games will get easier. It won’t just be on two or three bundled cable products,†DeWitt said. “I think you’ll have an expanded array of options for getting our games in the future. I just don’t know exactly what those options will be. But I think from a fan’s standpoint, they’re going to be better off.â€
Beau Snyder, 4, who was visiting from Indianapolis, runs around the field at Ballpark Village on Thursday, March 21, 2024, as a Cardinals spring training game is shown by Bally ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Midwest on the jumbo screen behind him.
Drop in cable subscribers
Diamond ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Group filed for bankruptcy in March 2023. Documents filed in the case detail the financial pressures that stacked up against the company in recent years.
As Americans abandoned their traditional TV plans, many didn’t replace them with an alternate way of viewing live broadcasts. Diamond’s lawyers wrote in filings that over the course of two years, the company lost agreements with Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV, DISH Network and Sling TV. Diamond lost roughly 35% of its subscribers — or about 22 million — between 2019 and March 2023.
“The key to that business model is having cable subscribers,†Rishe said. “With each new generation of sports fans, every year, we’ve slowly seen an erosion of people subscribing to cable bundles.â€
The business works this way: The television-watching public pays distributors such as Spectrum, DirecTV, AT&T and Comcast for the ability to access different bundles of channels. Those companies pay fees to Diamond’s networks for producing professional sports telecasts. Those sports networks pay fees to teams such as the Cardinals for the rights to broadcast their games.
Consumers’ growing indifference toward traditional TV has rippled all the way up the chain. The distributors, squeezed by the drop in subscribers, approach their negotiations with the sports networks more aggressively, Diamond’s lawyers wrote in court filings. The fees the networks pay to the teams — feasible when business was booming — have become “uneconomic,†they wrote.
Depending on the team and the agreement, broadcast rights can provide 20% to 30% of a team’s annual revenues, an attorney for the Texas Rangers said during a recent hearing. Ticket revenues typically are major league teams’ second-largest source of cash, experts said (the Cardinals tend to outperform others in that right, drawing outsized attendance for St. Louis’ market size). Corporate sponsorships, such as stadium naming rights and “patch deals†for bits of real estate on players’ uniforms, are a distant third.
Uncertainty around broadcast fees can in turn impact the length of teams’ player contract offers, said Brett Boyle, associate professor of marketing at St. Louis University and executive director of SportMetric Consulting.
“A lot of teams are very hesitant to give long-term contracts to free agents,†Boyle said. “Because they just don’t know how this is going to shake out.â€
Justin Martin and Kelly Kinsella work the bar at Broadway Oyster Bar, near Busch Stadium, on Wednesday, July 5, 2023, as the Cardinals’ game against Miami is shown on Bally ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Midwest.
The role of tech companies
In January, when Diamond ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Group’s lawyers showed up at a bankruptcy court, they were armed with news.
They had hammered out a set of deals that would inject money into Diamond, allowing the company to emerge from bankruptcy and continue broadcasting sports.
“For the first time in this case, Diamond, I can say confidently, is on a path to reorganizing and getting out of bankruptcy as a going concern,†Brian Hermann, an attorney representing Diamond, told the judge.
Diamond’s bankruptcy plan requires approval from the court, which has another hearing set for April.
Still, DeWitt said, the team has been doing its homework to be prepared for any situation in which Bally no longer holds Cardinals broadcasting rights. In that scenario, the team would have to line up a distributor. Whether the Cardinals would team up with the NHL’s St. Louis Blues for that is an open question.
DeWitt noted that Major League Baseball set up a local media department in preparation for Diamond’s bankruptcy. It took over broadcasts for the San Diego Padres last year after Diamond to the team and allowed the grace period to expire and for the Arizona Diamondbacks after Diamond asked to get out of its agreement with the team.
DeWitt emphasized that as it stands, the Cardinals still are under contract with Bally, which has made good on all of its obligations to the team.
Diamond’s proposed bankruptcy plan includes an investment from Amazon, which could make Bally ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ+ available for purchase on Amazon Prime. And over the long term, big tech companies such as Apple and Amazon likely will play a larger role in sports broadcasting, said Boyle, of SportMetric Consulting.
“It’s going to take somebody with big purse strings to be able to do something on a national level,†Boyle said. “My guess is, these major tech companies are going to be players, in some way, in this equation.â€
For DeWitt, any long-term game plan for televising the Cardinals has to include better options for viewers. He wants fans to have a method to stream games beyond the “authenticated streaming†that cable subscribers can access by, for example, logging into their Spectrum or DirecTV account on a computer or smartphone. Under the current format, a subscription to a distributor that carries Bally ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Midwest is needed to access Cardinals games via Bally streaming.
DeWitt repeatedly has called for an end to the so-called blackout policies that prevent the Cardinals and other teams from reaching fans through a streaming service in some regions.
“There are a couple ways in which our fans have trouble finding our games,†DeWitt said. “That’s something we’d like to get fixed here in the next couple years.â€
