A change in streaming rights voted on by Major League Baseball's owners this week could lead to more availability of in-market streaming video for those without cable packages. (Photo by Corey Perrine/Getty Images)

As part of his opening statement to reporters at Major League Baseball’s owners meetings this week, commissioner Rob Manfred said that teams had “approved unanimously a revised interactive media rights agreement.”

It was a jumbled bit of jargon that was easy to miss between the confirmation that the Kansas City Royals had a new ownership group and the part of the press conference where Manfred evaded questions about the sign-stealing investigation into the Astros organization. This winter is rife already with impactful storylines, existential threats to the game, and even some free-agent signings. It’s easy to ignore a change to the back-end business side of baseball. But this one might have direct implications for fans.

Asked to clarify what exactly the “revised interactive media rights agreement” looks like, Manfred said, “The biggest single change was the return of certain in-market digital rights — the rights that have essentially become substitutional with broadcast rights — those rights will return to the clubs.”

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Yankees president Randy Levine intimated the possibility of something like that back in August when the team announced that it had reacquired the YES Network. As the Associated Press reported at the time:

Asked how the deal might affect the digital streaming rights to Yankees games within the team’s market, club president Randy Levine said he expected Major League Baseball to announce changes to its policy soon. Teams cannot currently sell digital rights to local broadcasts.

Now, apparently, they can.

I have to be perfectly honest with you: I don’t fully understand the possible range of implications here. I’m not well-versed on the broadcast business and we’re not dealing with a lot of specific information. I do, however, have hopes and fears for what this will mean for fans. Namely: how this will impact the growing number of cord-cutters’ ability to watch their local team.

MLB Advanced Media first live-streamed a baseball game in 2002 — years before even YouTube existed. The first MLB.tv packages were sold to allow fans to watch pennant races at the end of that season, and in 2003, season-long packages to watch all “out of market” games became available. Baseball’s early embrace of streaming video proved to be an almost prescient boon to the company. The back-end capabilities developed as part of MLB.tv were so sophisticated that MLB began providing streaming services for other entertainment companies like HBO and the NHL. This eventually led to the creation and sale of BAMTech, which enriched each of the team owners by some $50 million last year.

And yet, for as long as MLB.tv has been widely celebrated as “digital media's most successful live video subscription product,” fans have found themselves frustrated by the restrictions and limitations.

Annoyance with the blackouts of “local” teams — which has long existed as a way to provide expensive exclusivity to regional sports networks — manifests in two main categories of concern: being blacked out from teams that are very close by and being blacked out from teams that are very far away. The latter is certainly more egregious. Fans in Iowa and Las Vegas and Hawaii are blacked out from as many as six teams, most of whom are hundreds of miles away. But the former is perhaps more pernicious. Cord-cutters around the country can’t pay Major League Baseball to watch their hometown teams.

View photos Baseball teams may soon sell streaming video rights for their games through more avenues than just the regional sports network with television rights. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images) More

Because the change in policy concerns only in-market rights, the MLB.tv package will likely remain unchanged. You still can’t use it to watch the Cubs in Iowa or the Yankees in New York. However, fans without cable subscriptions will hopefully soon be able to purchase digital access to the broadcasts of their local team a la carte. The upshot for the teams is obvious — the change provides them another product to sell for profit without having to make or do anything differently — but accessibility of these digital streams to viewers will likely depend on how and to whom they’re sold.

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