Presented by

Next TMT Insights
Things move a little slower for Mets fans these days. They still make themselves get out of bed every day. They make the coffee. They kiss their loved ones. They show up. They show out. They get the job done. For former Disney and Warner Bros. research guru Mark Loughney, now a senior consultant for Hub Entertainment Research, that means surveying sports consumers — lots of ‘em — and finding out some very interesting things. On Friday, Loughney sat down with Next TMT’s Daniel Frankel (yeah, on purpose) and presented data and insight about avid baseball fans, painting a much younger, and far more upwardly mobile strike zone than we had anticipated. A New Yorker through and through, Loughney even had a little pep in his step while doing it — after all, the Knickerbockers were playing later that night.

Fans are finally getting the a la carte world they asked for, and a few pay TV diehards are being big babies about it

Plagued by terrible pitching, Major League Baseball’s Washington Nationals finished 66-96 in 2025. The experience had to be most disappointing to Comcast-subscribing Nats fans, some of whom paid more than $150 a month for the up-tier Xfinity TV Ultimate package so they could watch games on Mid-Atlantic Sports Network.

With that Nats’ hitting awakened this season under first-year manager Blake Butera, the team is playing better … and D.C.-area fans are paying a lot less to watch them.

Moving on from regional sports network MASN after two decades, the Nationals partnered with with the league to launch an MLB.tv direct-to-consumer app, allowing local fans to stream 141 non-nationally televised Nationals games for as little as $15 a month. The team’s channel, Nationals.TV, is also available on linear pay TV — Comcast, Charter, Cox, Verizon and DirecTV all carry its games within the Nationals’ designated marketing area. Meanwhile, 10 Nationals games are being broadcast locally by Gray Media stations.

In terms of the Nationals’, er, national TV distribution, the other 15-20 non-local games are spread across an admittedly confusing array of broadcast, cable and streaming outlets owned and managed by ESPN/ABC, Fox, NBCUniversal, Apple and Netflix.

One bundle won’t solve for all of it anymore. But starting with the $15-a-month Apple TV/Peacock Premium bundle, a lower-priced virtual MVPD (think Sling TV) and an inexpensive over-the-air antenna could net all or most of these national games for less than $70 a month.

Sure, a la carte remains complicated. But what about the choice and affordability we loudly demanded when nearly half of us cut the cord the last decade? Aren’t local fans thrilled to cut their TV bill in half, with more choice than ever about how they watch?

Not all of them. Less than three miles down the road from Nationals Park, the compromised U.S. Justice Department expanded its probe of the NFL to MLB last month, questioning whether the 1961 Broadcast TV Act still applies to the leagues in the streaming era — and more specifically, if they should keep antitrust exemptions that let their owners jointly negotiate for TV deals.

Egging the DOJ and FCC on in this crusade — besides Rupert Murdoch — has been Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MASS.), who 10 years ago proved instrumental in shutting down Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable. At that time, Warren was focused on things like excessively high cable TV fees. But in January, she was calling on FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to stop “streamflation.”

The NFL, eager to split its nationally televised lentil into ever smaller slices and maximize revenue, has drawn most of the ire. But baseball has somehow, curiously to us, been worked into the discussion.

“You could make the argument that there’s other sports leagues out there that are potentially pushing the limits of the Sports Broadcasting Act even further than what the NFL has,” Carr said.

At least in baseball’s case, with nationally televised game ratings up an average 44%, to 2.28 million viewers, are fans really fed up?