Chicago Blackhawks, Bulls, White Sox Reach New Media Partnership With TV and Streaming Options
More details about the local broadcasting arrangements for the three teams will be available in the coming months.
There will officially be a new way to watch the Chicago Blackhawks, Bulls, and White Sox following the 2024 MLB regular season. The three teams are departing the NBC Sports Chicago regional sports network (RSN), but fans won’t have to worry about reduced access to their games going forward if reporting surrounding the move is accurate. The Athletic offered the first details about the new arrangement for the three teams, which have all agreed to a deal with Standard Media Group to broadcast their non-national games in the Chicago area starting this fall.
Key Details:
- The deal with Standard will reportedly include broadcast and cable channels, as well as streaming options.
- The Bulls, Blackhawks, and White Sox see their current deal with NBC Sports Chicago expire in October.
- Warner Bros. Discovery left RSNs behind in 2023, and Comcast could do likewise in 2024.
Standard Media Group owns a series of television stations in Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, and Rhode Island, but it does not own any stations in the Chicago area. So local broadcasters will have to license the rights to air Blackhawks, Bulls, and White Sox games from the company in order to air them.
The Athletic reports that Standard will create a new network to house the three teams, and will give fans ways to watch over-the-air as well as with cable. There will also reportedly be streaming options available, though it’s not clear whether Standard will create a streamer in-house, or whether it will sell their digital rights to an outlet that already has a streaming service.
The report specifies that Stadium — the Chicago-based multiplatform sports network featuring exclusive live and on-demand games and events, extensive highlights, classic games, original programming, and daily live studio programming — will not be involved in broadcasting games from the Bulls, Blackhawks, or White Sox as part of the deal with Standard. Bulls and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf bought controlling interest in Stadium last year, prompting speculation that he may try to shift the teams to that channel after the expiration of their deal with NBC Sports Chicago in October.
Will NBC Sports Chicago, Other NBC RSNs Be Shut Down?
There’s a good chance that NBC Sports’ parent company Comcast will decide to sunset NBC Sports Chicago permanently once it loses the rights to live games from its three current partner teams. In 2022, the company sold NBC Sports Washington to Monumental Sports Group, which promptly rebranded the channel as Monumental Sports Network instead of continuing to broadcast Washington Wizards and Washington Capitals games. NBC also shuttered NBC Sports Northwest after losing the rights to the Portland Trail Blazers in 2021.
Will the loss of the three Chicago-area teams convince Comcast to follow Warner Bros. Discovery’s lead and exit the RSN business altogether? WBD pulled out of its AT&T SportsNet-branded channels in 2023, no longer able to make the channels pay as cord-cutting continued to eat into cable viewership and providers want channel owners to pay more in order to have RSNs distributed.
Even with those market conditions in place, however, it seems unlikely that Comcast will walk away from its RSNs this year. The company holds the rights to some big-name teams, such as the Boston Celtics, Golden State Warriors, Philadelphia Phillies, and Philadelphia 76ers. Local rights to those teams would become highly sought-after assets if Comcast decided to quit RSNs and send those rights back to their respective clubs, as WBD did when it fled the sinking RSN ship.
It’s more likely that NBC Sports RSNs will shut down one at a time as they lose the marquee teams that fans watch most for. That’s a future that now seems all but assured for NBC Sports Chicago, and a preview of what will be in store going forward as teams try to increase their audience reach and move on from the no-longer-viable RSN model.
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