The prospect of a blackout does seem to scare owners and other stakeholders into taking steps to avoid them.
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Blackouts lead to disgruntled fans, angry advertisers, annoyed TV affiliates and embarrassed owners. Teams are already well-incentivized to avoid blackouts, Waldron says. "You change it and you create uncertainty." "It's part of an ecosystem," Waldron said.
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Waldron said that the blackout rule has been central to its ability to do that.Ī quarter of the NFL's revenue comes from ticket sales, and the league claims that the blackout rule helps to ensure full stadiums every week. The NFL remains the only major sports league that shows all of its games on local broadcast television (except for the games it blacks out for home team markets games broadcast on ESPN and the NFL Network are blacked out on cable in the teams' local markets in order to drive viewers to the broadcast airings). Gerard Waldron, an attorney with Covington & Burlington, which represents the NFL, said that the ability to black out games is "part of the foundation upon which the NFL has built its goal of maximizing fan engagement."
McCain said that "the rules as they are today only serve to benefit sports leagues and their member teams at the expense of the hardworking fans who support them so loyally through their money, time and passion." Read More Why so many NLF players go from rich to brokeĪt a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this month, Sen.
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That exemption allows the NFL to negotiate broadcast agreements for all its teams, and it's vital to the huge TV deals that professional football depends on. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, and Arizona Republican John McCain teamed up to introduce the FANS Act, which would require the league to end blackouts-under penalty of losing its antitrust exemption from the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. With the FCC's new rule mostly symbolic, senators from both parties are spending the closing days of the lame-duck session ripping into the league. But experts on both sides of the issue say there are still legal and logistical impediments to that actually happening. The NFL can still enforce its own blackouts in accordance with its contracts, but cable companies can now-in theory at least-import distant signals to show games on cable when the local TV version is blacked out. In September of this year, the Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to stop enforcing the league's blackouts. There were 16 blackouts in 2011, for example, but six of those struck the Cincinnati Bengals at home.
But in recent years, the narrow concentration of the blackouts has prompted localized uproar. In the 1990s, as many as 30 percent of games were blacked out with little political fuss. Read More The Broncos may be even better than you think Only two games were blacked out last year, and no games have been blacked out so far this season. The 85 percent modification came two years ago, at least partly in response to declining attendance. Before 2012, the NFL required teams to sell all of their tickets in order to avoid a TV blackout. The rule has been relaxed in recent years. But all of a sudden, Washington is taking a close look at blackouts.