House Judiciary Committee requests briefing from pro sports leagues on broadcasting markets and 'blackout' exemptions
WASHINGTON, D.C. – This week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust Chairman Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) sent a letters to National Basketball Association (NBA) Commissioner Adam Silver, National Football League (NFL) Commissioner Roger Goodell, National Hockey League (NHL) Commissioner Gary Bettman, and Major League Baseball (MLB) Commissioner Rob Manfred requesting briefings on sports broadcasting markets and "blackout" exemptions.
When national sports leagues first entered the television broadcasting market, each team individually negotiated and sold the broadcasting rights to their home games. Teams were forced to compete over a limited number of outlets and some had difficulty balancing broadcast revenue with ticket sales, with smaller teams often struggling to remain profitable.
In 1961, Congress passed the SBA to allow professional sports leagues to coordinate their broadcasting decisions in an effort to help protect smaller teams and the leagues as a whole. The SBA exempts "any league of clubs participating in professional football, baseball, basketball, or hockey" from antitrust liability for agreements related to the "sponsored telecasting" of their games. The SBA also included a "blackout" exemption that permits sports leagues to prevent games from being broadcast "within the home territory of a member club of the league on a day when such club is playing a game at home."
The current state of the sports broadcasting market has changed considerably since the 1960s. The majority of sports viewership now occurs outside of traditional network broadcasting. As a result, most of the distribution agreements that a sports league enters into are subject to antitrust challenges, while a narrow subset are not, creating legal uncertainty, distorting the market, and "effectively expanding the blind spot for potential antitrust violations." While "the SBA may have made sense in an era when network broadcasters had significant market power and major sports leagues were seen as at a disadvantage," because of "massive changes in the video-competition marketplace, it no longer does."
As the Committee evaluates the sufficiency of existing law, it has requested a briefing on the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB's participation in the sports broadcasting market and related matters.