LOS ANGELES — For decades now, the way you watch your baseball team has been pretty much the same. You paid a cable or satellite company a monthly fee for a bundle of channels, many of which you would never watch.
Your team's regional sports network (or RSN) — SportsNet LA for the Dodgers, Bally Sports West for the Angels — was one of those channels. If your team's game was selected for a national broadcast — on ESPN, Fox, FS1, TBS or MLB Network — you also could find those channels within your bundle. You might have to look up which channel would carry that day's game, but you already had paid for access to it.
The bundle format is in decline, with customers balking at paying for dozens of channels they never watch and streaming services offering the chance to pay only for the programming you do want to watch. There might be no more critical concern for Major League Baseball, where teams have grown accustomed to ever-higher payments from cable and satellite companies, all based on the concept that each home subscriber should pay perhaps $5 per month for a team, even if 95% of those customers do not watch the games.
