Buy Me Some Peanuts And a $30 App?

Regional sports networks are in a jam and looking online to make up for lost revenue

- Austin Carr and Gerry Smith

NESN 360 is the standalone streaming app of the New England Sports Network, the basic-cable home of the Boston Red Sox and the NHL’s Bruins. It became available last summer, and if you live in New England and cut the cord, it’s the main way to reliably watch these teams play. But it can be glitchy, and the network has already rolled out more major revisions (98) than Red Sox wins last season (78). “It takes a long time to assemble this kind of tech product,” says Sean McGrail, NESN’s chief executive officer, in an early March interview at the broadcaster’s headquarters in Watertown, Massachusetts, a suburb west of Boston. “We want the experience to be flawless.”

It needs to be: NESN 360 costs $30 a month, more than the ad-supported subscriptions to Disney+, HBO Max and Peacock combined. “It’s more like twice the price of Netflix,” McGrail says. “At $1 a day, how inexpensive is that to have live access to almost every single Red Sox game and Bruins game?”

Regional sports networks across the US are grappling with similar questions as they adapt to modern TV viewing habits. NESN 360 was the first direct-to-consumer streaming service introduced by an RSN as an alternative to the pricey cable packages that have long-sustained local stations. It’s the product of a tough situation—cord-cutters are slicing into the once-lucrative cable fees of RSNs even as broadcast rights and stadium productions remain wildly expensive—that may not be easily solved. Charge too little for live streaming, and RSNs accelerate cord-cutting and anger cable and satellite distributors such as Comcast Corp. and DirecTV; charge too much, and they risk alienating loyal customers.