When the Chicago Sports Network launches as the new 24/7 TV home of the White Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks on Oct. 1, many Chicagoans initially won’t be able to tune in, at least not without a rabbit ears antenna.
A carriage agreement with DirecTV is expected to be announced shortly, but Comcast and other pay-TV providers are still on the sidelines, leaving an old-school solution for those desperate to watch the Bulls and Blackhawks as their new seasons begin.
CHSN has struck a deal with a small, independent Chicago TV station to broadcast its 300-plus game schedule and associated sports shows, making the nascent network free to anyone who can capture the over-the-air signal.
While not being able to watch the White Sox may be a blessing after coming off potentially the losingest season in baseball history, there may be more than a few Chicago sports fans clambering up on their roofs this fall to hook up that rusty old TV antenna.
Jason Coyle, a veteran sports media executive and president of the Chicago Sports Network, expects more pay-TV distributors to come on board in the months ahead, but said over-the-air TV will bring in new viewers and more budget-conscious sports fans.
“It comes down to reaching fans to the full extent of our rights geographically, and providing them the network on as many platforms as we possibly can,” said Coyle, 53.
A joint venture between the three teams and Nashville-based Standard Media, the Chicago Sports Network is supplanting NBC Sports Chicago, the 20-year-old regional sports network whose broadcast rights expire after the current White Sox season.
NBC Sports Chicago, founded as Comcast SportsNet in 2004, was a partnership between the cable giant and the Cubs, Sox, Blackhawks and Bulls. A ratings and revenue winner for most of its run, it covered Cubs and Sox World Series championships, three Blackhawks Stanley Cups and several Bulls playoff appearances.
But the Cubs broke off to form the Marquee Sports Network in 2020 and regional sports networks, long the cash cow of pay-TV, have struggled financially in recent years as cord cutting takes its toll on the cable bundle. Add in prolific losing by the three remaining teams, and NBC Sports Chicago is set to go dark at month’s end.
The Chicago Sports Network plans to broadcast more than 300 games this season as it builds its distribution partners and associated local sports programming to fill out the schedule. It is bringing over some familiar pre- and post-game talent from NBC Sports Chicago, including Pat Boyle, Tony Granato and Caley Chelios for the Blackhawks, and Jason Goff, Kendall Gill and K.C. Johnson for the Bulls.
Veteran NHL announcer Rick Ball and analyst Darren Pang will handle the Blackhawks play-by-play, while Adam Amin and Stacey King will call the Bulls games for the new network.
CHSN is completing an atrium studio in the United Center where fans will be able to interact with the live game broadcasts. A studio for White Sox games at Guaranteed Rate Field is also in the works for next season, Coyle said.
The Chicago television market is defined by Nielsen as 3.46 million homes from Lake County in Illinois to Indiana’s LaPorte County. But there will likely be some large distribution holes in the market when the new RSN launches.
Sources familiar with negotiations said DirecTV is close to signing a carriage deal with the Chicago Sports Network that would put the RSN in the lineup across Illinois, Iowa and portions of Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan.
The Chicago Sports Network is expected to replace NBC Sports Chicago in the DirecTV channel lineup on Oct. 1, and would similarly be included in the 125-plus channel Choice Package, which costs $74.99 per month, sources said.
A DirecTV spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
DirecTV has about 300,000 subscribers in the Chicago area.
Meanwhile Comcast, the teams’ former partner with NBC Sports Chicago, has closer to 1 million subscribers in Chicago, which will leave many local sports fans in the dark when the new network launches.
“We don’t have an agreement with the Chicago Sports Network at this time,” a Comcast spokesperson said.
To fill some of the void and reach new viewers, CHSN struck a deal with WJYS-Ch. 62, a full-powered UHF TV station licensed to Hammond that broadcasts from Willis Tower. The main channel is 24/7 religious programming, while its two digital subchannels air shopping networks.
Come Oct. 1, those two digital subchannels, 62.2 and 62.3, will be the new over-the-air broadcast home of the Chicago Sports Network.
Once the only way to watch television, about 15% of homes nationwide receive free broadcasts over an antenna in the age of pay-TV and streaming, according to Nielsen. That would put the Chicago market at about 520,000 antenna homes that would be able to watch CHSN from day one.
Coyle believes over-the-air viewers are an untapped market for a regional sports network.
“We do not want people to cut the cord,” Coyle said. “But there are people that are never going to buy pay-TV. This is how they’re already watching television. They’re watching with an antenna.”
Regional sports networks are struggling to navigate the changing pay-TV landscape, where cord-cutting and streaming have eroded subscribers and squeezed the carriage fees providers are willing to pay for sports, long the glue holding together the cable bundle.
The pay-TV industry lost 4 million subscribers in the first six months of the year, with traditional cable or satellite video falling by 12.6%, while virtual providers such as Hulu Live, YouTube TV, SlingTV and DirecTV Stream declined by 6.9%, according to a September report from industry analysts MoffettNathanson.
That leaves linear pay-TV penetration at just over half of U.S. households, with no “floor” to the decline, the report said.
With consumer demand falling, pay-TV providers are cutting back on the distribution fees they will pay for regional sports networks, or dropping them all together, such as Dish Network has done.
“The RSNs that were once a critical tentpole in the linear TV sports story have largely disappeared from linear distribution,” MoffettNathanson said in its report.
Nowhere is the RSN challenge more evident than the bankrupt Diamond Sports Group, which owns the Bally Sports networks covering 33 teams across the U.S.
In 2019, Sinclair Broadcast Group acquired 21 former Fox regional sports networks from Disney for nearly $10 billion. But cord cutting and the declining value of carriage agreements proved financially unsustainable for the debt-laden network, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a Texas court in March 2023.
Diamond has since renegotiated carriage agreements with pay-TV distributors, struck long-term deals with the NBA and NHL and is far along in talks with Amazon about making the regional sports network available on the Prime streaming platform, creating a viable model for the RSN to emerge from bankruptcy before Thanksgiving, according to sources familiar with the situation.
When it emerges, Bally Sports is expected to be rebranded as FanDuel.
As the traditional RSN model struggles, a number of teams are adding direct-to-consumer streaming services, including the Cubs’ Marquee Sports, which launched the service at $19.99 per month last year.
Coyle said CHSN will have a companion app at launch, but gave no guidance on timing for a direct-to-consumer streaming service.
A growing number of teams are also leaving RSNs for over-the-air TV, the latest being the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, who announced earlier this month they will broadcast their entire schedule on local stations this season.
Taking over an entire local channel to broadcast the full 24/7 offerings of a sports network, however, is potentially groundbreaking for CHSN. Having two channels will enable the network to air live Bulls and Blackhawks games simultaneously, Coyle said.
“I think this will be the biggest investment in sports teams to a fan base ever, 300 games given away to those who can’t afford pay-TV,” said Coyle, a digital media sports veteran with longtime ties to Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the White Sox and Bulls. “We have to be able to reach fans.”
A Harvard Law School graduate, Coyle co-founded Silver Chalice in 2009 with Reinsdorf and White Sox executive Brooks Boyer. They launched 120 Sports, a short-lived Chicago-based streaming sports network in 2014, and when that closed down shifted to Stadium, a successor digital sports network based out of the United Center, with Coyle at the helm for both ventures.
Coyle sees the new network as the biggest challenge, and the biggest opportunity of his career.
Beyond building distribution, Coyle has to launch the new network when all three teams are struggling, making it a harder sell to advertisers, pay-TV providers and the fans themselves.
The Bulls have been below .500 for most of the last decade, while the Blackhawks went from winning three Stanley Cups between 2010 and 2015 to not qualifying for the playoffs in six of the last seven years.
Meanwhile, the White Sox, who won the World Series in 2005, have made the postseason only three times since then, and this year are on track to break the MLB record for futility set by the expansion 1962 New York Mets, who lost 120 games.
“It’s a very bad year to be rolling out something new like this, where the White Sox are doing historically poorly,” said Marc Ganis, a Chicago-based sports marketing consultant.
The White Sox TV audience has fallen to fractions during the team’s final season on NBC Sports Chicago, averaging a .7 rating, according to Nielsen data. That’s down from a 1.0 rating last season and 1.7 rating in 2022.
For comparison, the Cubs averaged a 4.5 rating on NBC Sports Chicago during the team’s championship season in 2016.
Both the Bulls and Blackhawks averaged 1.2 ratings during their last seasons on NBC Sports Chicago, also representing a declining audience over the past three years, according to Nielsen data.
While the traditional RSN business “continues to shrink,” Ganis said it is premature to write its epitaph. At the same time, he said local TV sports needs to evolve and diversify in the wake of changing viewership habits.
“The old RSN model, it’s not dead,” Ganis said.”It’s just not the only option in the mix. It should be part of a mosaic, which includes over-the-air, streaming, national TV broadcasts and RSNs.”
The Chicago Sports Network plans to launch a promotional campaign this week to introduce itself to viewers, and perhaps spur some to get a TV antenna or a DirecTV subscription.
Coyle believes the homegrown network will build over time, both in content and viewership, but he is confident it will convey an authenticity that true and new Chicago sports fans will connect with from the jump.
“It might look curious why we’re going into this now, but it’s really a great opportunity,” Coyle said. “It’s a great opportunity to start again and reimagine what this regional sports media operation should look like.”
rchannick@chicagotribune.com
