A carriage dispute between Comcast and YES Network threatens to leave scores of Yankees fans in the dark on the eve of MLB’s Opening Day festivities.
At midnight Wednesday, an extension of the legacy deal between the cable operator and the regional sports network will expire, putting YES on shaky ground in neighboring New Jersey and other areas adjacent to the home market.
When the clock ran out on the carriage deal toward the end of last year, both parties agreed to an unofficial continuation in hopes they could negotiate a renewal well in advance of the start of the 2025 baseball season. Trouble is, the two sides remain worlds apart on a new agreement, as Comcast aims to bump YES up to a pricier digital tier, while the network hopes to forestall an immediate shift.
Based on a similar tier reassignment that was hashed out with Boston’s NESN earlier this year, an imposed relocation of YES to Comcast’s “Ultimate TV” menu would cost subscribers on the order of an additional $20 per month. That increase would come on top of a recent hike in the operator’s blanket monthly regional sports network fee, which kicked in last December across most markets.
(YES partners with Sportico on a monthly sports-business program that is carried by the network.)
The threat of a signal interruption seems to have roused New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who on Tuesday issued a statement encouraging the two combatants to sit down together and hash out a deal. “Both broadcasting parties need to stay at the table and resolve this dispute without impacting fans,” Hochul wrote in a memo posted on the Empire State’s official website. “Fans should never be caught in the crossfire of a corporate dispute.”
West of the Hudson, a New Jersey state senator, Paul Sarlo, weighed in on behalf of his constituents, noting that a YES price uptick “would impose a costly burden on loyal, middle-class fans in a region of passionate supporters.” Sarlo went on to encourage Comcast to keep YES on the less-pricey tier.
The pols’ pleas are likely to fall on deaf ears. Comcast’s take-it-or-leave-it offer to RSNs is rather unambiguous: Bite the bullet or go dark. And the cable giant has never shied away from playing hardball; in November 2015, the YES signal went out in some 900,000 homes in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut after the RSN (then owned by Fox Sports) failed to reach a new carriage deal with Comcast. YES would remain off the air in those households until March 2017.
The lengthy outage did not have an outsized impact on Comcast’s day-to-day operations. While the operator does not break down its subscriber figures by each individual market, Comcast’s annual reports for 2016 and 2017 indicate that it grew its national video base by some 100,000 subscribers during the YES blackout—a function of a 1% increase in the numbers of overall homes passed.
YES in the past 12 months has renewed carriage deals with some of its biggest cable and telco-TV distributors. While the Wednesday deadline is rapidly approaching, talks between the two companies are ongoing.
A blackout is not necessarily a fait accompli. In a statement issued to Sportico earlier Tuesday, a YES spokesperson said, “We are not going to turn off our signal, and we hope Comcast will not take us off its lineup.” A further extension could be in the cards before midnight strikes.
While Yankee fans won’t necessarily miss out on Thursday afternoon’s home opener against the Brewers, as that game will be carried nationally by ESPN, any further delay would likely imperil the club’s YES debut on Saturday. In the event of a blackout, fans may keep tabs on the Yanks with a subscription to the Gotham Sports app, a joint offering from YES and MSG Networks. While access to the full app costs $41.99 a month, users can choose a YES-only option for a monthly fee of $24.99.
MSG went dark in Comcast systems on Oct. 1, 2021. No deal has been achieved by the two parties since.
Comcast customers in the San Francisco area were recently notified that the operator’s NBC Sports Bay Area and NBC Sports California would be remanded to a pricier tier. Eventually, every RSN that does business with the operator will be ordered to head for higher ground; that said, YES rival SNY won’t have to reckon with a move for quite some time, as it is currently locked into a long-term deal with the operator.
Comcast’s NBC Sports Group owns an 8% stake in SNY.