FCC Seeks Comment on Sports Broadcasting Practices and Marketplace Developments

For decades, Americans have enjoyed turning on their television sets and quickly finding the games they wanted to watch for free on an over-the-air broadcast. Yet watching your favorite sports team play is not as easy these days. Many games are still available for free over broadcast TV, but there has been a surge in recent years of games going behind the paywalls of various streaming services. While this can increase the number of games and sports available to fans, many consumers today find it more difficult to find the events they want to watch and are now paying to sign up for one or more video distribution platforms that consumers can find difficult to navigate. From a historic perspective, live sports and broadcast television have enjoyed a long and mutually beneficial relationship—one that worked well for consumers too.  Sports leagues leveraged the wide distribution of broadcast TV to help grow their fan base and expand their revenues.  In turn, broadcast television stations used the popularity of live sports and the advertising revenues from the programming to support their own industry and operations, including funding the local news and reporting that are so important to our country. The Federal Communications Commission's Media Bureau would like for commenters to address the current and emerging trends in the distribution of live sports programming. How does the present marketplace benefit or harm consumers? How does the recent trends towards fragmentation facilitate or inhibit the ability of local broadcast television stations to meet their public interest obligations, including their production of local news and reporting? In what ways is the marketplace continuing to evolve and how will future changes impact consumer access to free over-theair news and information, including public safety information?