| Major League Baseball is off to its best start in years. Viewership is up across all its major national TV packages, led by ESPN, where ratings are up 22%. TBS and Fox have scored 16% and 10% lifts, respectively, the league said this week. Game attendance hit a seven-year high in 2024 and is inching up again this year. (The viewership on Japanese TV network NHK is also up about 22%.) And yet, the league is scrambling to find a buyer for a major TV package that includes 30 regular season games, the Home Run Derby, the Wild Card playoff round and up to 10 spring training games. ESPN said in February that it would end its broadcast deal with MLB after the 2025 season, pulling out of the relationship three years ahead of schedule. The sports network had been paying the league $550 million a year and wanted to pay less than half that price. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred initially responded by saying ESPN was a shrinking platform, only to later concede “we liked the deal we had” and that he wishes he didn’t have to sell these rights at this moment. NBC and Apple are in talks to buy some or all the games, though neither is willing to match the $550 million price tag. Fox has expressed an interest in more baseball as well. Other potential buyers, including Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon and Netflix, are all sitting on the sidelines. MLB will find a home for these games; the league is still valuable. Rule changes have made the games shorter and a little more fun. The two best players — Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge — play on premier teams in the country’s two biggest cities. But it’s going to have to take a pay cut, at least in the short term. Timing has not been kind to MLB. Every major media company is more cost-conscious than the last time MLB was in the market. Many of the biggest players in sports media are suffering steep declines in their cable TV business. Pretty much all the major entertainment companies are trying to improve the financial performance of their streaming services. Media companies are telling leagues they want their rights deals to pencil out – aka turn a profit. That’s not always been the case. Networks have long been willing to overpay for sports because they believe it helps them in other parts of their business. Marquee sporting events strengthen their hand in negotiations with cable providers and advertisers. They also bring viewers into the ecosystem who stick around for other shows. Wait, you might say. Didn’t Disney, Comcast/NBC and Amazon all just spend billions of dollars on the NBA? They did, but media companies are prioritizing their most important rights. The NBA ratings may be down, but the league still has more cultural cache than baseball. Disney locked in college football while Comcast took the Olympics. Baseball committed an unforced error by bringing in a few potential buyers on cheaper, experimental deals. It sold Friday night to Apple and Sunday mornings to Roku. While it’s not clear that either one of those companies is ready for a $550 million baseball package, they certainly aren’t going to do it when they already get some rights for a fraction of the price. The package on offer doesn’t have many can’t miss games. And there lies the biggest challenge for baseball. It is a product built for the old world of cable – not the new world of the internet. Cable networks wanted tonnage. They wanted lots of games they could show to fill 24 hours of live programming every day. The more sports rights the better. ESPN’s networks have aired arena football, Canadian football and lacrosse. Streaming services aren’t interested in offering a bottomless buffet of games because most viewers don’t have time to watch them. Streaming services and broadcast networks want big, loud events that can cut through the noise online. Most viewers tune out baseball until the end of the season. The Dodgers and Yankees just played on Sunday Night Baseball, a rematch of the World Series from last year featuring the two best players in the game. But even the most ardent baseball fan would tell you the results of a game in May don’t matter all that much. The baseball season is too long and has too many games to attract a national audience every day. Diehard fans just want to watch their local team. The league’s most valuable asset is the playoffs, but most of those games are covered under its deals with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery. The league is prioritizing “reach,” which is code for a broadcast network, so that it can expose the game to more people and increase its value for its next deal. That would favor NBC (or potentially Disney or Fox) over Apple, which accounts for less than 1% of the total streaming audience, according to Nielsen. The league is just trying to hold on through 2028, which is when all its current deals expire. Manfred can reset the market and rethink his media strategy. The field of buyers may be easier to read. ESPN will have a sense of what is and isn’t working on its new streaming service. Netflix will likely be more serious about rights. The biggest question mark for MLB in 2028 will be its local rights. Regional sports networks are collapsing, and the league would like to consolidate all local rights and sell them, either on their own or via a third party like Amazon. But it must convince teams that still make a fortune from local rights, like the Dodgers and Yankees, to forgo their profits and participate. That will be a tougher sell than the current negotiation. The best of Screentime (and other stuff) | Goldman changes its tune on music | Goldman Sachs, which has spent the last decade publishing rosy forecasts about the future of the music business, has lowered its expectations for future growth. The financial giant says 2024 was the first year in recent memory where industry sales fell short of its expectations. The biggest reason is the deceleration in paid streaming, a subject we’ve covered many times. Yet Goldman remains optimistic on the long-term health of the business, projecting sales to grow by 37% over the next five years. The growth will be broad-based, including live and recorded music. The biggest reasons for optimism in streaming? Price increases! The No. 1 tour in the world is…Beyoncé. She is making about $13 million a night performing in front of an average of more than 45,000 fans. No other artist is toping $7.5 million on the current Pollstar charts, though I hear the Kendrick Lamar/SZA tour is up there with Beyoncé. These numbers contradict earlier reports that Beyoncé was struggling. She is selling out almost all these stops. She may have scheduled one too many nights in Los Angeles or New York, but this tour is a monster. Netflix’s board decisionLong-time Netflix board member Jay Hoag failed to win reelection at the most recent shareholder meeting. Hoag has been on the board of Netflix since 1999 — before the company went public. But he missed two of the four board meetings last year. The rest of the board must now decide whether or not to accept his resignation. Hoag’s long-time board mate Tim Haley already said he was leaving the board. Is this a changing of the guard under new leadership? Deals, deals, dealsThank you to the many readers who responded to my playlist last week with music recommendations. I am still working my way through them, but my favorite so far is the French pop duo Kids Return. Also, a strong recommend for Becoming Led Zeppelin, the story of a classic rock band told through the eyes of its members. | 
