After nearly two months, on Saturday, Optimum Cable and MSG finally resolved their carriage dispute, and the channel that broadcasts in-market games for the Buffalo Sabres, New Jersey Devils, New York Knicks, New York Islanders, and New York Rangers returned to its respective regions in the New York tristate area. The disagreement began as the calendar flipped to 2025 has caused an unusually high amount of public discourse, especialy amongst New York politicians looking to curry favor with constituients.

Key Details:

• After nearly two months, Optimum and MSG resolved their carriage dispute over the weekend.
• After having been blacked out since Jan. 1, 2025, MSG’s channels returned to the cable provider on Saturday.
• No details about the new agreement have yet to be released.

Without an agreement between the channel provider and distributor, MSG, MSG2, and MSG SportsNet were pulled from Optimum cable lineups on New Year’s Day. While no details about the agreement have been revealed, the channels were returned to cable packages on Saturday. There has been no official word on whether or not this will result in a price increase for customers, or if there will be changes to channel lineups necessitated by the deal, MSG and Optimum’s parent company Altice released a vague joint statement over the weekend.

“MSG Networks and Optimum are pleased to announce they have reached an agreement for the relaunch of MSG Networks on Optimum video lineups,” the sides said. “MSG Networks and Optimum would like to thank everyone for their patience as we partnered to reach this new agreement to benefit our fans and Optimum subscribers.”

Early in the process, Altice accused MSG of “unfair” negotiating tactics while asking for ‘exorbitant” price increases to keep its channels on Optimum’s air. As has been the case in the vast majority of regional sports network (RSN) negotiations over the past year, Optimum was looking to move the MSG channels off of its main lineup in order to not force customers uninterested in the sports programming to pay for it.

“Optimum offered to absorb [MSG’s] egregious price demands if we could package MSG Networks in a way that would give more flexibility and control to our customers, so that fans could continue to watch and pay for their content while non-viewers would not be forced to pay for what they don’t watch,” Optimum said when the channels were pulled on Jan. 1. “MSG Networks said no and refused multiple offers from us to reach a deal.”

Over the past year, channel distributors have looked to move RSNs like MSG off of their main channel lineups, because, while they are extremely important to sports fans, customers who do not follow the teams associated with the channels are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with having to pay the high price that they come with while having no interest in the content provided. While that is still a possibility in this case, the fact that it was not mentioned in the initial statements would seem to indicate that, for the time being, MSG’s will remain where they are.