Senator Baldwin's 'For the Fans Act' aims to end blackouts and lower barriers for sports fans
MADISON, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Imagine this. It’s game day, and you invite your fellow sports fans over to your house to watch the big game. It turns out you don’t have the right streaming service to watch your local team. So instead, you walk over to your local bar, but they don’t have it either despite trying to get it.
This isn’t a scenario that is uncommon. It seems like every time fans try to watch their favorite team, it’s always on a different platform, and paying for them all can get expensive. Not just for the average fan at home, but for bars and restaurants, too.
LJ’s Sports Tavern in Madison knows the headache all too well. The Madison establishment has been open for nearly 10 years and the owner says since he has opened, his prices have nearly tripled just to play sports on his TVs.
“We did the math the other day and I think it’s about 30 grand a year just for the services we have to pay for, not counting buying the TVs and the cable bill,” Johnny Kavanaugh, owner of LJ’s Sports Tavern in Madison, said.
That price tag has taken a toll on this bar owner’s bottom line, and he’s not alone. The Wisconsin Restaurant Association says the rise of streaming has complicated the professional sports landscape. When businesses don’t have the games customers want, fans simply stop coming.
“When a fan comes and they can’t see their favorite sports team for whatever reason, whether it’s women’s basketball or men’s hockey or the Bucks, Brewers, or so on, they are going to be trained then, not to come back to that bar, restaurant to be able to see that game in the future,” Kristine Hillmer, president and CEO of the Wisconsin Restaurant Association, said.
Hillmer says bars and restaurants already have lower profit margins than they use. She says on average, pre-Covid, it was 3-5%. Now, with the increase in staffing cost as well as rent and utilities, the profit margin for most restaurants is around 2.5%.
That’s why Senator Tammy Baldwin has filed the For the Fans Act, which would require hometown teams to give free access to local fans. That means it would require professional leagues to provide access for local fans to watch all games for teams based in the state in which they reside, through a single, free option. That could include streaming on an ad-supported service or a local over-the-air broadcast. It would also ban blackouts on league-owned streaming services. According to Sen. Baldwin, the legislation requires streaming services to provide access to view every game within their respective leagues. That means consumers who subscribe to services like MLB.TV and NBA League Pass will no longer face blackouts when games are played in their local media market or set to air exclusively on a third-party streaming service like Amazon Prime Video.
“If you are lured into a subscription, you want to be a super fan and watch all of your games and then they black out the games, that’s a deceptive practice, which the federal government can come in and enforce laws against deception and deceptive practices from businesses,” Sen. Baldwin said.
Business owners like Johnny Kavanaugh understand that professional sports are a business, but he says sports teams need fans from all socio-economic backgrounds.
“They need the people to be engaged too, “Kavanaugh said. “I think it’s important that they take care of the regular people and not just the people that have enough money to pay for all the games.”
We reached out to all of the professional sports teams in Wisconsin for comment on this legislation. The only reply by our deadline was from the Green Bay Packers. The organization sent the following statement.
"With respect to Sen. Baldwin’s proposed legislation, the Packers greatly appreciate that Sen. Baldwin recognizes the SBA’s crucial importance to the Packers and we look forward to working with her on this issue important to fans across the state and beyond."