WASHINGTON — U.S. Representative Jim Jordan is investigating the antitrust protections enjoyed by professional baseball, basketball, hockey, and football teams in their home-market blackout contracts for sports programming.
The heads of the National Football League, Major League Baseball, National Hockey League, and National Basketball Association received letters on Monday from the Champaign County Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, requesting briefings on their sports broadcasting markets and blackout exemptions.
The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which was passed to allow professional sports leagues to coordinate their broadcasting choices in order to safeguard less profitable clubs and the leagues overall, is the law in question.
Any professional football, baseball, basketball, or hockey league of clubs is protected from antitrust liability under the SBA for contracts pertaining to the sponsored telecasting of its games. Additionally, it contained a blackout provision that permits leagues to prevent games from being televised within a league member club’s home territory on a day when that team is playing at home.
In their correspondence, Jordan and Rep. Scott Fitzgerald of Wisconsin, the chair of the Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee, note that since the SBA was passed, the sports broadcasting industry has undergone significant change, with technological advancements making it simpler and less costly to distribute content to viewers.
For the first time, digital sports viewership overtook traditional television viewing in 2023, according to the letters, and this trend is predicted to continue.
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According to the letters, some fans find it more costly and challenging to follow their teams during the season, even with these technical advancements. To watch every game at home in several major sports leagues, a fan might have to buy an over-the-air antenna and register for multiple streaming services. Even Nevertheless, fans cannot watch some games at home no matter how much they want to spend or how many streaming services they buy because each major sports league has its own blackout regulations.
The committee requests briefings from all leagues by 10 a.m. on August 25 at the latest.
According to the letters, the SBA no longer makes sense because to significant changes in the video-competition market, even though it might have in the past when network broadcasters had a lot of market strength and big sports leagues were thought to be at a disadvantage.
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