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This reckoning has been on the horizon for a while: 2024 is setting up to be the year the decades-old models of delivering sports broadcasts to people's homes undergoes a stark change.Sinclair Broadcast Group announced in a Texas court in mid-November its intent to shut down its bankrupt subsidiary, Diamond Sports Group, which operates 17 regional Bally Sports networks across the U.S., at the end of 2024. "Diamond’s business is going to go away," Sinclair lawyer David Seligman told the court.Diamond is the largest operator of regional sports networks (RSNs) in America, holding local broadcast rights for 39 teams in the NBA, MLB, and NHL. That's 42% of all live local sports TV inventory, not counting national rights. It filed for bankruptcy protection in March when it could no longer pay interest on its $9 billion in remaining debt from the purchase of 22 Fox Sports RSNs in 2019.While Diamond is trying to stay afloat for another year, the math and consumers' cord-cutting habits are working against its survival.At its peak in 2014, there were 100.5 million cable households in the U.S. At the end of the second quarter of this year, there were an estimated 61 million. This past summer, for the first time in the TV era, fewer than half of U.S. households watched TV via broadcast or paid cable.In the third quarter, Comcast, the largest cable provider in the U.S., reported it shed 2.1 million of its cable subscribers - 12.5% - in the past year.Earlier this November, the NBA struck a deal to have Diamond relinquish its outstanding local rights for 15 teams at the end of this season. In return, the NBA and those teams agreed to lower payments from Diamond for this season. The NHL's pursuing a similar deal. Diamond is attempting to keep 10 of its remaining 12 MLB clubs for 2024, and one industry source said relinquishing those rights after next season is on the table.Diamond's struggles are an inflection point for live sports TV. It seems to be a matter of when and not if the entire RSN model falters. Earlier this year, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), the No. 2 RSN player, announced plans to sell its remaining RSNs by the end of this year. Nick Laham / Getty ImagesIt was an alarming acceleration to many equities analysts like Alex Morris, who owns TSOH Investment Research. Morris researches media companies like Disney and Comcast."I do wonder how much this is going to change, or has already been changing, what it means to be a sports fan," Morris told theScore. "How much are people going to seek out games when they can go watch a new TV show or movie on their own schedule, versus chasing down some local RSN, who wants you to pay $19.99 a month."The world has just kind of changed, particularly for sports with an excessive amount of (games) and where most regular-season games are of limited importance to the postseason."By the end of 2024, there will likely be a wave of live TV sports rights hitting the market not seen since the New York Islanders pioneered the cable model in the early 1980s. Additionally, the NBA's national broadcast rights end after the 2024-25 season, and several networks and streamers are lining up to get a piece of that valuable property. Will tech giants take over? Will direct-to-consumer models be viable? Can something like the cable bundle be recreated so teams in the same market are not competing against each other for subscriptions? Those questions will play out across three leagues, and they have wide-ranging implications for how we watch, and for the bottom lines of those franchises."Follow the technology. Technology doesn't go backwards," said Greg Bouris, director of the undergraduate sports management program at Adelphi University, who previously worked for SportsChannel and for pro teams. "We watched the evolution of this industry grow from newspapers, to radio, to TV, to cable TV. And that was the one that changed everything, that placed the industry on a whole other trajectory: regional sports networks."It's going to be a different world." The NBA gets the first crack at determining what that world looks like, with its national rights up for bids and half its teams' local rights being reclaimed from Diamond following the season.It'll be the first time an array of rights for one league come to market since streaming overtook cable as the primary way consumers watch video."It gives the NBA more flexibility," Bouris said. "Having teams have their local rights expire at the same time their national rights (expire) gives them at least more decision-making power in how they want to dole out those rights."On the national side, the NBA is reportedly looking for two to three partners and is interested in streaming platforms. The league's current rights holders, ESPN and TNT, have an exclusive negotiating window that opens in March, but tech giants like Apple and Amazon are also reportedly interested.Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Thos Robinson / Getty ImagesThe tech giants' robust balance sheets give...
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