The RSN Didn’t Die. It Was Unbundled.

Strategic Analysis | September 19, 2026

For years, the regional sports network looked like a television business.

It was really a risk-transfer business.

A team sold its local media rights to an RSN. The RSN produced the games, negotiated carriage with cable and satellite companies, sold advertising, collected per-subscriber fees, and paid the team a contractually promised rights fee. The team got something enormously valuable: certainty. The network got the upside if it could monetize the games for more than it had promised to pay.

And millions of households helped fund the arrangement whether they watched the games or not.

That was the model’s great strength. It was also the source of its eventual instability.

In 2019, Sinclair’s Diamond Sports Group acquired 21 former Fox regional sports networks at a $10.6 billion enterprise valuation. Those networks held local rights involving 42 MLB, NBA and NHL teams. Much of the purchase was debt-financed. Diamond ultimately filed Chapter 11, emerged in January 2025 as Main Street Sports Group with dramatically less debt, and then encountered another financial crisis. By spring 2026, the FanDuel Sports Network system was winding down; teams that had spent decades outsourcing their local-media businesses suddenly needed somewhere else to go.

The easy story is that the RSN died.

That is not quite what happened.

The channel may be disappearing in many markets. The functions it performed are not. They are being separated, reassigned and recombined among teams, leagues, broadcast stations, cable distributors, Amazon, DAZN, league apps and other platforms.

The regional sports network did not simply die.

It was unbundled.

And that distinction explains where local sports media is going next.

The traditional RSN sat between two very different sets of contracts.

On one side were distributors. RSNs typically earned distribution revenue based on contractual rates multiplied by the number of subscribers receiving the network. On the other side were teams, whose media-rights agreements could require substantial payments that rose over time regardless of whether the RSN’s subscriber base or advertising revenue kept pace. Public filings describing the RSN business have stated the problem plainly: rights obligations could increase even when subscriber and affiliation revenue did not.

That architecture works beautifully while the bundle is stable.

It becomes brutal when the denominator shrinks.

As households cut the cord, some distributors dropped expensive sports channels altogether and major virtual distributors frequently declined to carry them. The rights payments, however, did not automatically shrink simply because fewer households remained to fund them. A 2024 congressional submission from DirecTV described RSNs as caught between increasingly expensive sports rights and a shrinking subscriber base.

That is the part of the RSN collapse that is easy to miss.

The underlying sports content did not suddenly become unwanted. Live local sports remained unusually scarce programming. What failed was the financial promise surrounding it: a middleman could no longer safely guarantee yesterday’s rights fees against tomorrow’s distribution economics.

The old model said to the team:

Give us the rights. We will take the media risk.

The emerging model increasingly says:

Keep the rights. We will help you manage the risk.

That is a fundamentally different business.

Once the traditional RSN is broken apart, “broadcasting the game” turns out to contain several distinct businesses.

Someone must own or control the rights. Someone must produce the telecast. Someone must sell advertising. Someone must negotiate cable and satellite carriage. Someone must operate or supply the streaming product. Someone must authenticate geography. Someone must bill the customer. Someone must market the service. And someone must absorb the loss if all of those revenue streams fail to cover production and rights costs.

The old RSN often did nearly all of that.

The new market increasingly allows each function to sit somewhere different.

Major League Baseball provides the clearest example. For the 2026 season, MLB is directly producing and distributing local games for 14 clubs, including the Brewers, Cardinals, Guardians, Mariners, Reds, Tigers and Twins. Those games remain available through traditional cable and satellite distributors while also being sold directly to consumers without the old local blackout structure. By July, every MLB club had some form of in-market DTC option.

But MLB has not simply created another regional network.

Under its centralized model, there is no traditional guaranteed RSN rights fee. MLB handles production and distribution, collects distributor and advertising revenue, charges production costs, and the remaining economics flow to the club. In other words, the infrastructure is centralized while the economic exposure moves back toward the team.

That is much more important than whether the telecast ultimately appears on channel 660 or an app.

Baseball’s strategy provides the clearest glimpse of what league centralization could eventually mean.

MLB now has the production capability, streaming technology, distributor relationships and commercial infrastructure necessary to keep a club on television even when its existing media partner disappears. The league has effectively created a fallback system that prevents the collapse of an RSN from becoming a broadcast emergency.

That changes negotiating leverage.

An incumbent distributor is much less powerful when a league can say: If this agreement fails, we can produce the games ourselves tomorrow.

The same is true when a team negotiates with a prospective media partner. An alternative does not have to reproduce the entire RSN organization from scratch. Production, DTC technology and league infrastructure may already exist.

More strategically, MLB views this system as a bridge.

Commissioner Rob Manfred has repeatedly identified 2028—when the league’s current national media cycle ends—as an opportunity to reconsider how national and local rights are packaged. MLB’s current agreements with ESPN, NBCUniversal and Netflix run through 2028, and ESPN has also acquired rights to distribute MLB.TV and, over the term, sell certain MLB-controlled in-market products through its digital ecosystem.

That creates the possibility of something more consequential than simply replacing failed RSNs.

If enough local rights become available together, MLB can approach future distributors with a larger and more flexible inventory: national games, local games, streaming packages and perhaps different combinations for different buyers.

The economic advantage is obvious. Thirty isolated teams negotiate from thirty different positions. A league holding a large block of premium live inventory negotiates from another position entirely.

The complication is equally obvious: not every team needs rescuing.

A club with a lucrative long-term regional arrangement has a very different incentive from one whose RSN disappeared. That is why league centralization is not merely a technology project. It is a governance and revenue-allocation problem. The better a team’s existing local deal, the more expensive its cooperation may become.

Baseball therefore may be centralizing infrastructure faster than it can centralize economics.

That difference will matter.

The NHL is experimenting with a slightly different architecture.

Beginning in 2026–27, NHL Productions is providing centralized local-broadcast production for the Hurricanes, Blue Jackets, Wild and Blues. The league supplies production, graphics, replay capabilities, engineering and other infrastructure while also assisting clubs with distribution and monetization.

But the clubs can still own and commercially operate the local product.

The Wild described its new platform as team-owned and operated. The Blues said they would control sales, marketing and distribution while using NHL production infrastructure. The Blue Jackets launched the Blue Jackets Hockey Network with cable and satellite carriage, Prime Video streaming and selected over-the-air games.

Meanwhile, Prime Video has become the exclusive local streaming distributor for six NHL clubs beginning this season: Carolina, Anaheim, Columbus, Dallas, Minnesota and St. Louis.

Notice what happened there.

The team can own the media business.

The league can make the television show.

Amazon can operate the storefront.

Cable and satellite companies can remain distributors.

Local stations can provide free reach.

There is no single RSN performing every function.

There does not have to be.

The NBA may be the best evidence that there will not be one universal successor model.

Phoenix moved aggressively toward free over-the-air distribution and streaming in 2023. The model has now been extended through 2030, with Suns games available over the air across Arizona and digitally through Arizona’s Family’s streaming product. The team says its statewide reach expanded dramatically after leaving the traditional RSN structure.

Oklahoma City has built the Thunder Gameday Network around a different mix: Thunder+ through the NBA App, substantial television distribution through Griffin Media, limited free over-the-air broadcasts and traditional distributor carriage.

Indiana went another direction. DAZN is becoming the Pacers’ local streaming home for 2026–27, while a portion of the schedule will be available free and some games are expected to receive over-the-air distribution.

Detroit has signed with Scripps for free over-the-air television. Orlando has announced Cox Media Group stations as its local television partner while separately planning a DTC solution.

And the NBA itself increasingly acts as the navigation layer. Its “Tap to Watch” system directs fans from league and team digital properties to the correct national or local provider based on the game and the user’s location.

That may sound like a small product feature.

It is not.

For decades, the cable guide told a fan where the game was.

In a fragmented media world, whoever becomes the front door to the game can become strategically important even without owning the underlying rights.

The strongest counterargument to the “unbundling” thesis is that regional sports networks plainly still exist.

That is true.

NESN still offers the Red Sox and Bruins through both traditional television distribution and NESN 360. YES and MSG still operate regional networks serving some of the country’s most valuable sports franchises. SportsNet LA still carries the Dodgers.

But even these survivors increasingly look less like the old model.

YES and MSG combined their DTC products through Gotham Sports, made the product available through Prime Video, and in 2026 announced that DAZN would become their exclusive direct-to-consumer streaming home for the coming NBA and NHL season while the linear networks continued to exist.

That is not the disappearance of the RSN.

It is its transformation from the distribution system into one component of a larger distribution system.

The next regional sports network may still have studios, announcers, rights and a familiar brand.

It may simply no longer need its own app—or eventually even its own channel number—to matter.

For teams, the attraction of the new model is easy to understand.

A club that controls more of its local-media business can expand reach, integrate media with sponsorship and ticketing, experiment with price, build a direct relationship with viewers and shift distributors without surrendering the underlying rights.

The cost is that the team now has to care much more about actual media economics.

Under the traditional RSN structure, the rights fee could arrive regardless of whether the network had a good year.

Under a self-operated or league-operated model, weak subscriptions, poor advertising sales or expensive distribution affect the club much more directly.

Consider MLB’s Cardinals. Sports Business Journal reported that the club expected roughly a $20 million local-media revenue reduction under the new MLB-controlled structure compared with its prior arrangement.

That illustrates the strategic trade perfectly.

Greater distribution is not automatically greater revenue.

A team can triple its potential audience and still earn less money if the old system was extracting more dollars from the cable bundle than the new system can collect voluntarily from viewers, advertisers and distributors.

That is why the relevant question is no longer simply:

How many people can watch?

It is:

How many different ways can those viewers be monetized without making the product so fragmented or expensive that they stop watching?

The winning model will have to solve both.

There is another layer to this transition.

Once teams stop requiring a conventional RSN to perform every function, large streaming platforms can aggregate local rights without necessarily purchasing entire regional networks.

Amazon is already doing exactly that.

Prime Video now distributes numerous regional sports products, including six NHL local streaming packages and access to various existing regional networks and team services. DAZN is similarly expanding from a sports-content service into local distribution, including its Pacers agreement and its deal to become the DTC home of YES and MSG Networks.

That suggests that the ultimate successor to the RSN may not be another network at all.

It may be a marketplace.

A fan opens one major platform, selects the local team package, pays the subscription, and watches a production created by the team or league. The platform supplies billing, authentication, device distribution and customer acquisition without necessarily owning the underlying media rights.

That structure resembles what happened elsewhere in digital commerce: the strategic value shifts from owning every product to owning the place where consumers find and buy the products.

The scarce asset remains the game.

But the valuable position immediately downstream may increasingly belong to whoever aggregates the games most effectively.

None of this happens merely because a team announces that it prefers another platform.

Local media rights are contractual property.

Existing agreements may contain exclusivity provisions, matching rights, rights of first refusal, territorial restrictions, renewal options, post-termination obligations and detailed allocations of linear, digital and streaming rights. National agreements may carve certain games out of the local package altogether.

The Phoenix Suns learned the point early.

When the Suns announced their Gray Television/Kiswe arrangement in 2023, Diamond Sports challenged the transaction during its bankruptcy, arguing that its existing agreement gave it contractual rights in the replacement process. The bankruptcy court initially blocked the new arrangement. Diamond later declined to match the replacement offer, clearing the way for the Suns’ deal to proceed.

The lesson extends far beyond Phoenix:

Media transformation occurs one contract expiration at a time.

For sophisticated teams, leagues and distributors, the decisive language may therefore be buried far from the headline rights fee: who controls DTC rights, who may sublicense them, whether rights can be assigned, what happens after nonpayment, which platform receives authentication rights, how a matching provision operates, whether local television and streaming rights can be separated, and when rights actually revert.

Those provisions can determine whether a team can pivot in days or spend months litigating its escape route.

As leagues assume larger roles in selling or distributing local media, another old question becomes more important: how much collective selling can professional sports leagues do?

The Sports Broadcasting Act gives professional football, baseball, basketball and hockey leagues a statutory antitrust exemption for certain joint sales of rights in “sponsored telecasting.” But the protection is not a universal immunity for every modern form of sports distribution. In Shaw v. Dallas Cowboys, for example, the Third Circuit held that a subscription satellite package fell outside the Act’s sponsored-telecasting exemption.

Nor are separately owned teams automatically treated as one company for antitrust purposes. In American Needle v. NFL, the Supreme Court held that NFL teams remained separate economic actors when jointly licensing separately owned intellectual property, although the Court also emphasized that cooperation necessary to create league sports is generally evaluated under the more flexible rule of reason.

Baseball and hockey territorial broadcasting restrictions have also faced direct antitrust challenges. The Garber and Laumann litigation attacked territorial exclusivity and blackout arrangements; the cases ultimately settled rather than producing a final merits ruling resolving the legality of the overall system.

None of that means league-centralized local media is unlawful.

It means the opposite of something more simplistic: its legality should not simply be assumed because leagues have always sold television collectively.

The technology is changing faster than some of the statutes governing it.

That issue is increasingly visible in Washington as well. In 2026, the FCC opened an inquiry addressing sports-media fragmentation, access and consumer costs, while the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing specifically examining whether the Sports Broadcasting Act still fits the modern sports-distribution marketplace.

The more leagues combine local streaming rights, the more important the distinction among broadcast television, subscription distribution and digital products may become.

The next local-media model does not need to maximize one revenue stream.

It needs to maximize optionality.

A team wants the ability to put games on cable while cable remains valuable, stream directly to cord-cutters, use over-the-air television to maximize reach, move DTC distribution to Amazon or DAZN if those platforms offer better economics, and preserve enough control to switch again when the market changes.

That is almost the inverse of the traditional long-term RSN contract.

The old system monetized certainty.

The new system increasingly monetizes flexibility.

That also explains why league production infrastructure matters so much. The easier it becomes to move a telecast among distributors without rebuilding production from scratch, the less dependent a team becomes on any particular distributor.

Production becomes portable.

Distribution becomes replaceable.

The rights become the crown jewel.

And the entity controlling the fan relationship becomes increasingly important.

The collapse of the traditional RSN system is often described as the end of local sports television.

It is closer to a corporate reorganization.

The old RSN bundled rights acquisition, production, advertising, cable carriage, streaming and financial risk inside one company. The emerging market is separating those functions and allowing teams and leagues to decide which ones they want to own, which they want to centralize and which they want to outsource.

MLB is building centralized league infrastructure. The NHL is combining league production with team-owned media businesses and third-party streaming. NBA teams are testing everything from free over-the-air television to league-app DTC services to DAZN. Traditional networks such as YES and NESN are adding streaming and outside distribution rather than relying on the cable channel alone.

There may never be one model that replaces the RSN.

That may be the point.

The future of local sports media is likely to be a portfolio of models—different by league, market, team economics and negotiating leverage—with the underlying components capable of being rearranged whenever the market changes again.

The RSN used to answer one question:

Who has the local television rights?

The next era requires three:

Who owns the rights? Who owns the customer? And how easily can everyone else be replaced?

Those questions—not the channel number—will determine who controls the next generation of local sports media.