With commissioner Rob Manfred looking to centralize the media rights of MLB teams, Sam Kennedy says the Red Sox are on board.
At the Front Office Sports conference last month, Manfred expressed a desire to have all 30 teams under the league’s umbrella by 2028 when MLB’s current national broadcast deals expire.
In theory, centralizing all of the media rights would make them easier to market to networks, and Kennedy told Sports Business Journal the idea has his backing.
“It’s good for the entire industry,” Kennedy told SBJ. “Major League Baseball and the commissioner and (deputy commissioner) Noah (Garden) have been working hard on it for a couple years. Our distribution model has been disrupted by technology, and we’ve got these territories, and we’ve got to make sure that our consumers, wherever they are, whether they’re watching the Red Sox in Boston, Nashville or Singapore can easily find our games or consume our games on a device in a format they want. So we’ve been part of trying to help examine how this could come together.”
It’s unclear what the move would mean specifically for NESN, which the Red Sox own 80% of, but Kennedy is optimistic that the centralization would benefit all parties.
“The incentive is that first of all the RSNs and the local linear platform is going to live and survive for a long time,” Kennedy told SBJ. “NESN is going strong. Marquee Sports Network is going strong. YES Network is going strong. But it’s about everyone working together to figure out how many games should be local, how many games should be broadcast and streamed globally, and it’s a very exciting exercise. And we have a great local business, but we just want to make sure that the diaspora of Red Sox fans, Cubs fans, Yankee fans, Dodgers fans, Giants fans, Brewers fans can all get to us quickly and in a way where there’s not a ton of friction.”