DirecTV signs Exclusive Deal with MLB: The Business of Sports

Well, unless you have DirectTV, if you’re a hard core baseball fan life is going to suck for you. According to the NY Times, Major League Baseball and DirecTV have come to an agreement for the MLB Extra Innings package. Now, DirecTV is the exclusive outlet for the Extra Innings package.

As well, MLB will have a baseball network starting up too, ala the NFL and NBA.

Anyhow, I have DirecTV, so it’s not a big deal for me. Besides, I usually just watch games via my laptop from MLB.com’s web service both at home and work.

From the NY Times article: “Extra Innings has been available to 75 million cable households and the two satellite services, DirecTV and the Dish Network. But the new agreement will take it off cable and Dish because DirecTV has agreed to pay $700 million over seven years, according to three executives briefed on the details of the contract but not authorized to speak about them publicly.

InDemand, which has distributed Extra Innings to the cable television industry since 2002, made an estimated $70 million bid to renew its rights, more than triple what it has been paying. Part of its offer included the right to carry the new baseball channel, but not exclusively.

The baseball channel is scheduled to start in 2009.”

I can understand why quite a few customers would be upset, as you’d have to ditch your cable service for DirecTV. The problem is there are a lot of apartment communities that will not allow you to have a dish, so that’s part of the market unable to access other games via TV. The only option for those without DirecTV would be to subscribe to the MLB.com package that streams video of the games (I’d strongly advise you only get it if you have a Broadband connection).

I think it sucks that MLB did this, but it’s all a business, and in the end, they want greater control of their product.