The NFL isn’t the only league that enjoys an antitrust exemption for its broadcasting rights. And the NFL isn’t the only league under scrutiny for exceeding it.
Bloomberg reports, via Sam Neumann of Awful Announcing, that the Department of Justice investigation regarding the NFL includes Major League Baseball.
FCC chairman Brendan Carr confirmed to Bloomberg that the federal government’s focus was never simply on the NFL.
“You could make the argument that there’s other sports leagues out there that are potentially pushing the limits of the Sports Broadcasting Act even further than what the NFL has,” Carr said. “The NFL is something that everyone is aware of and focuses on. And so I speak of it just as a shorthand, but we are focused more broadly on other leagues as well.”
Baseball currently appears on a broad array of national platforms: NBC, ESPN, Fox, TBS, Apple TV+, MLB Network, Peacock, and Netflix.
The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 gave the major sports leagues the ability to sell broadcast rights for games as a league. That arguably applies only to FCC-regulated networks. When leagues sell to cable, satellite, or streaming, the exemption may be exceeded.
If other sports leagues are also being investigated, it takes some of the steam out of the idea that the probe is about the NFL’s current effort to get more money under existing deals. Other leagues, like the MLB and NBA, currently aren’t in that situation.
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