CHSN and Comcast Battle as Blackhawks Fans Miss Games

Chicago’s newest sports network has yet to be available for Comcast subscribers.

Despite launching on Oct. 1, the Chicago Sports Network (CHSN) has not reached a distribution agreement with the largest cable provider in the Chicago region. As a result, Blackhawks fans with Comcast have missed the NHL team’s first two local telecasts on the new network and could miss at least one more with the team playing in Calgary on Tuesday night. Furthering the plight is that the Bulls will kick off their regular season in New Orleans on Oct. 23.

Carriage disputes aren’t uncommon with both media companies and multichannel distributors attempting to use sports as either the carrot or the stick in negotiations. The current poor state of Chicago sports isn’t helping in this dispute, although there’s still excitement around the Blackhawks’ second-year sensation Connor Bedard and the return of Lonzo Ball to the Bulls lineup for the first time in nearly two years.

According to an Oct. 12 report in The Athletic, Comcast wants to place CHSN in one of its pricier cable packages in a deal similar to what Diamond Sports Group eventually agreed to for its Bally Sports RSNs. CHSN, for its part, agreed to take in a lower rights fee from Comcast, yet does not want to end up in the pricier tiers.

Additionally, even though CHSN is shown on broadcast TV, it must make retransmission agreements with cable operators, satellite companies and similar video distributors to be carried in their systems.

CHSN has not responded to request for comment.

CHSN was formed to distribute Blackhawks, Bulls and White Sox games after those teams chose not to renew their deals with regional carrier NBC Sports Chicago, which officially went dark on Sept. 30. (White Sox games, for better or worse, will come to the network in 2025.) CHSN is a joint venture between the three teams and Standard Media, a privately held company in Nashville that owns local television stations in Rhode Island, Nebraska, Missouri and Kentucky.

Chicago is the third-largest media market in the U.S., according to Nielsen, with 3.7 million television households. Ideally, the network would have a wider reach as a free, over-the-air option than it had in the paywall world of cable. In hopes of reaching fans who do not subscribe to cable or satellite, CHSN is still negotiating with other multichannel video programming distributors such as Fubo and Hulu. It is currently available on DirecTV, DirecTV Stream, U-Verse and Astound (the new name for RCN).

Chicago is not the only market that contains a carriage beef with Comcast. The nation’s largest cable provider is also at odds with Scripps’ Salt Lake City affiliate Utah 16, which is set to provide local broadcasts for the Utah Hockey Club. At the moment, DirecTV is the only multichannel provider that has an agreement with Utah 16.