A weekly update on the business of the Braves:
From the owner: The Braves were mentioned, albeit in passing, during team owner Liberty Media's annual stockholders meeting last week. John Malone, Liberty's billionaire chairman and a cable TV pioneer, was wrapping up an answer to a question about ever-escalating sports broadcast rights fees when his company's baseball team came to mind.
“Now, the good news is that in another 17 years, I think, the Atlanta Braves get to re-cut their deal,” Malone said with a laugh.
He was referring to the Braves’ local TV deal with Fox Sports South and SportSouth. Liberty inherited a 25-year deal when it bought the Braves in 2007. Part of the agreement was reworked when the Braves moved an additional 45 games to Fox’s regional channels from Turner Broadcasting’s Peachtree TV in 2013. That substantially increased the revenue the Braves get, but the deal is still far less lucrative than many teams’.
To the stockholder’s question about the cost of sports broadcast rights, Malone suggested the traditional bundling of cable TV channels eventually “will come apart,” giving consumers more flexibility and putting pressure on media companies, such as Disney, that have expensive national sports deals.
“I’d be a little worried if I had 20 or 30 years of sports commitments on an escalating basis,” Malone said, “because I don’t know that the U.S. households in large enough percentages will support that kind of a cost structure in the out years. … I think that the reality for cable operators is you’ve got to live with it for a while and eventually the technology will undermine that market power and you’ll end up with people able to buy more what they want and less in some kind of a tight bundle.”
Charting ratings: The first three games of this week's Braves-Padres series posted TV ratings ranging from 2.1 to 2.9 in the Atlanta market. The rating is the percentage of TV households tuned in on average.
The big winner on sports TV here this week: Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Tuesday, which posted a 17.0 rating in the Atlanta market.
