Baseball Atlanta Braves Establish BravesVision as Club-Owned Broadcaster

The Atlanta Braves have established a club-owned and -operated multimedia platform, BravesVision, to serve as the official local broadcaster of the club’s games as of the 2026/27 MLB season, when it will be airing 140 games and producing “extensive” pre- and post-game shows.

According to Sportico, the Braves are working to secure carriage deals with services like Charter, Comcast and DirecTV and might pursue deals with such virtual multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) as Hulu + Live TV and YouTube TV.

Whatever the details, coverage will extend into six states: Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, parts of Florida and the home state of Georgia. Residents there will have three options to watch in case of blackouts: a video service provider (VSP), streaming (Braves.TV) and over-the-air (simulcasts with Gray Media).

Nationally the Braves will appear through MLB’s broadcast partners: Fox/FS1, ESPN, TBS, NBC/Peacock and Apple TV+.

Atlanta Braves Holdings says the club will have “full oversight of the production, sales, marketing, and distribution of its telecasts.” Braves President and CEO Derek Schiller says the “endeavor will bring the most vital link to our fanbase – our television broadcast – back under the control of our organization,” because “[g]enerations of Braves fans were raised watching games on a network that shared ownership with the baseball team.”

Trouble at the RSNs

BravesVision in particular is a response to the collapse of Main Street Sports Group, operator of the FanDuel Sports Network, which in turn operates regional sports networks (RSNs) for several MLB clubs – 19 of them at its peak, 2022/23. Back then it was called Diamond Sports Group, and it was under that name that the group declared bankruptcy on March 14, 2023, with about $9 billion in debt.

Restructuring and debt reduction ensued over the next 20 months, resulting in the emergence of Main Street Sports Group in January 2025. But things still look dark.

Last month, according to MLB Trade Rumors, nine MLB clubs – the Cincinnati Reds, the Detroit Tigers, the Kansas City Royals, the Los Angeles Angels, the Miami Marlins, the Milwaukee Brewers, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Tampa Bay Rays and, yes, the Atlanta Braves – terminated their deals, in part over missed payments. Main Street holds in-market deals with another 13 NBA and seven NHL teams, but without a cash infusion it could be winding down operations by spring, Sportico reports.

A North American peculiarity

RSNs have been typical for decades of the US, a wide land with a high population and regional differences. Canada, some of whose professional sports cross the border, has followed suit despite a smaller population.

The earliest RSN was the Madison Square Garden Network, established in 1969. SportsChannel was big in the 1980s. All of the RSNs worked out carriage deals (with MVPDs) and charged fees per subscriber.

European sports, by contrast, are broadcast on national free-to-air television, paid bundles (e.g., Sky Sports) or league-wide streaming. The last option now exists in the US as well. MLB has set up a platform with two packages: MLB.TV (all out-of-market games live or on demand, for $150 per season) and MLB+ (US-only stream of MLB Network, for $60 per season).

Asia, Latin America and Australia tend to have national or club-direct models, none with the local specialization of RSNs.

And the networks call them cord-cutters

Ten years ago there were about 35 RSNs. There are now scarce more than five. This diminution is due not to mergers and acquisitions – as with, say, banks – but to a decline in one way of doing things and a rise in another.

Back in the 1980s proper television broadcasting, with its transmission by actual airwaves, lost ground to something called cable television, and now cable television, the heir to scheduled programming, is losing ground to streaming and the lures of on-demand material. Signals still flow through cables, to be sure, but those cables tend to be fiber-optic.

We have entered the era of cord-cutting. In other words, the public is cutting the cord that binds them to multichannel services and turning to the internet, which they’re also already paying for.

Not just the Braves

Like the earliest RSN before it, the earliest platform with club ownership emerged around New York City. The Yankees set up the YES Network back in 2002. The Chicago White Sox have a partial stake in NBC Sports Chicago, set up two years later, but they share this with their crosstown fellows the Cubs as well as with the Bulls (NBA) and the Blackhawks (NHL).

Curiously, the Yankees have no deal in place or in view with their own crosstown fellows, the Mets, whose deals are with SportsNet New York and Comcast/NBCUniversal.

YES, then, is the sole club-owned platform to emerge during the RSN heyday. All of the rest have resulted from the heyday’s end. There are at present seven platforms with various ownership stakes. Yankees and Braves aside, they cover the Houston Astros, the San Diego Padres, the Texas Rangers and the Los Angeles Angels.