Diamond Sports and Comcast Resume Talks as Key Hearing Looms

Comcast and Diamond Sports Group may be inching closer to a resolution of the dispute that has left scores of baseball fans out in the cold, based on a recent court filing and the resumption of talks between the two sides.

In a four-page motion filed Thursday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, Diamond asked to shift an upcoming deadline back by nearly a week as the principal owner of the Bally Sports RSNs prepares for the crucial confirmation hearing at the end of the month. Attorneys for the company are looking to move the voting/opt-out deadline and the plan-objection deadline from July 18 to July 24, which would push both dates within five days of the July 29 hearing.

While deadlines and target dates have been modified throughout the 16-month bankruptcy saga, the request comes as Diamond and Comcast have returned to the negotiating table after a long stretch of radio silence. Fifteen of Diamond’s RSNs went dark on the cable operator’s systems on May 1, after the legacy carriage agreement between the two parties expired, leaving Comcast subscribers from Atlanta to Minneapolis unable to watch their hometown teams.

If the revival of the dialogue doesn’t necessarily imply that the Diamond RSNs are on a fast track to being reinstated, this week’s détente can still be seen as a welcome development. Executives who’ve confirmed that Comcast and Diamond are once again on speaking terms caution that the adversaries remain leagues apart on a number of key deal points. 

Carriage disputes and signal interruptions are a wearisomely familiar feature of the programmer-operator dynamic, but this standoff is particularly knotty, as it transcends mere wrangling over fees. Comcast won’t budge on its resolution to move the RSNs to a higher-priced digital tier, while Diamond would much prefer to remain on the basic tier, which is about $20 cheaper each month than the cabler’s beefed-up “Ultimate TV” package.

Comcast’s intransigence would appear to be unshakeable, as the operator has established that it plans to shift all of its RSN partners to a pricier tier as soon as their respective carriage deals come up for renewal. The company has already done so with ROOT Sports Northwest, MASN and SportsNet Pittsburgh, and NESN is likely to be subject to a similar migration after its own distribution deal runs out at the end of 2024.

None of this has been lost on Diamond’s league partners. “This is not a run-of-the-mill dispute,” MLB attorney James Bromley said during a May court hearing. “It’s a matter of public record that Comcast has dropped other RSNs in the past and simply walked away from them.”

Case in point: Since Comcast stopped carrying MSG and MSG+ on Sept. 30, 2021, not a word has been exchanged between the two parties. A reconciliation is now about as likely as the prospect of the Chicago White Sox winning the World Series this fall.

Two months after the RSNs went dark in Comcast homes, the channels were pulled from Altice USA’s Optimum systems. Comcast closed out the first quarter of 2024 with 13.6 million residential video subscribers, while Altice reported 2.1 million connections. Together, the two operators accounted for 16% of Diamond’s overall customer base. As it happens, the judge overseeing the bankruptcy proceedings is on the fence as to whether a failure to patch things up with Comcast would be a deal-breaker for Diamond’s re-organization plan.

“Whether Comcast is essential to a deal or not, I don’t know,” Judge Christopher Lopez said last month. “I think it’s time for everyone to put their cards on the table to see where we are.”

The revelation of the hole cards began in earnest last month when Judge Lopez ruled that Diamond must provide its league partners with anonymized documentation of its carriage agreements with Cox, Charter and DirecTV. The judge ruled that the disclosure of these financial details is necessary if Diamond is to present a viable plan for emerging from bankruptcy during its upcoming confirmation hearing.

The motion to delay the voting and plan-objection deadlines has no material impact on the July 24 confirmation hearing, which will proceed as planned.