The Untapped Economics of Minor League Broadcasting

In 2020, Minor League Baseball was restructured. Roughly forty affiliated teams lost their affiliation as MLB cut from 160 farm clubs to 120 Professional Development League licensees. Cities that had fielded a professional baseball team for generations — in some cases for more than a century — were told that the math no longer worked. The teams were either absorbed into independent leagues, re-classified into smaller summer-collegiate outfits, or simply disappeared.

The math, at the time, was compelling. Affiliated minor league baseball ran on player-development subsidies from the parent clubs, thin gate revenue, limited sponsorship, and almost no meaningful broadcast revenue. For most of its history, a AAA club’s television deal — if it had one — was a token agreement with a regional cable affiliate that produced a handful of games a year at barely-above-cost production. The AA and A-ball clubs had even less. The revenue line was tiny, the cost line was stubborn, and the parent MLB clubs, doing their own post-2020 math on developmental cost per prospect, decided that forty of these teams were not worth the carry.

It is worth stating the decision in its own terms. It was not cynical. It was, at that moment, defensible.

Here is what I want to argue: by the time that decision was made, the unit economics of minor league broadcasting had already flipped. The broadcast layer had quietly become something it had never been before — a plausible path to real audience and real local revenue, at near-zero incremental cost. The teams that got cut were the teams whose economic case had already changed, and the people making the decision did not know it. Because the measurement layer to know it did not exist yet.

Most of the minor league teams we cut were not dying. They were about to be reborn. Nobody was watching closely enough to notice.

What a Minor League Broadcast Used to Cost

To see what has changed, it helps to remember what a minor league broadcast used to be.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, if a AAA team produced a television broadcast at all, it was typically a deal with a local cable affiliate that carried a handful of home games a season. The production was modest — a couple of cameras, a local broadcaster, a small crew — and the economics were brutal. Production cost ran into the tens of thousands of dollars per game. Ad inventory was sold locally at rates that, on a typical Tuesday night game drawing a few thousand in-venue attendees and a few thousand more on television, could not remotely cover the production cost. The math only worked when the cable carrier paid a rights fee — which meant the team was effectively subsidized by the cable bundle, the same way every small piece of local sports programming has historically been subsidized by the cable bundle.

When the bundle started collapsing — which I have written about at length — the rights-fee subsidy collapsed with it. Regional sports networks started filing for bankruptcy; Diamond Sports Group, operator of the Bally Sports RSN portfolio, filed for Chapter 11 in March 2023 carrying roughly $8 billion in debt. The small line items on RSN rights cards — the AAA club’s ten-game package, the AHL team’s Sunday afternoon slot, the USL team’s highlight show — were the first things cut. By 2019, most minor league teams outside of the largest markets had no functional broadcast revenue at all. Their games were either not televised or streamed on obscure platforms with production that, to put it charitably, looked like what you could produce with a laptop and a single fixed camera in center field.

That was the reality going into 2020. A minor league broadcast was a cost center. A small cost center, often a zero-revenue cost center, but a cost center. The case for keeping an affiliated team alive had to be made on player development, on civic value, on stadium economics, on anything except the broadcast.

And then three things happened in parallel that nobody in the room during the 2020 contraction was tracking.

The FAST Stack

The first thing that happened is that the distribution layer changed completely.

Free ad-supported television — FAST, in the jargon — went from a curiosity to an infrastructure. The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus, Amazon’s Freevee (now Prime Video with ads), Pluto TV, Tubi, and a long tail of platform-specific FAST offerings collectively built out a connected-TV distribution network that reaches a large and still-growing fraction of American households. Parks Associates measured FAST usage at roughly 45% of U.S. internet households in Q1 2025, with Nielsen’s Gauge reporting the Roku Channel alone pulling nearly 3% of all TV-viewing time by mid-2025. The usage curve has flattened from its early explosion but the installed base is now structural.

The important thing about FAST is not the reach — although the reach is enormous. The important thing is the economics.

A FAST channel, once produced, costs almost nothing to distribute. The platforms do the distribution in exchange for a share of the ad inventory. The channel operator produces or aggregates the content and sells the ad impressions, typically through a combination of direct sales and programmatic. A sports channel on a FAST platform does not pay carriage fees. It does not negotiate with cable MSOs. It does not print subscriber circulars. It does not need a national sales force. It uploads a playlist, runs an ad server, and waits to see if people watch.

For most content categories, the FAST economics are marginal. The CPMs are lower than premium streaming, the audience is diffuse, and the competition for the same eyeballs is fierce. FAST has historically worked best for library content — old sitcoms, classic Westerns, reality show reruns — where the content is already produced and the incremental distribution cost is literally zero.

Sports is different. Sports is live. Sports delivers synchronous audience. Sports attracts a specific kind of advertiser — local, regional, national — who will pay a premium to reach viewers at the moment of peak engagement. On a FAST channel, a live sports event performs like nothing else in the category. It is, in platform terms, the most valuable inventory on the grid.

The unit economics of a minor league broadcast on a FAST channel, properly understood, look radically different from the unit economics on cable. Production cost is still a real line item — though connected-TV-native production has itself gotten cheaper, as the tools have matured and the expectations around broadcast polish have evolved away from the traditional-TV standard. Distribution cost is effectively zero. Ad inventory is sold against a live audience in real time. And the audience, once the channel is discoverable, can scale to numbers that would have been unthinkable for the same content on cable.

This is not theoretical. Victory+’s Sunday Night Soccer product — which I have written about at length — is the clearest instantiation I know of this model at work in American sports. Victory+’s NWSL Sunday Night Soccer franchise launched in March 2026 with 25 primetime matches on a free ad-supported platform, with no carriage friction between the fan and the game, building a primetime audience for a sport that on cable could never have justified the slot. If the model works for the NWSL, which operates at a revenue tier far below the big four American leagues, it works a fortiori for a minor league broadcast at a tier below that. The economics are more permissive, not less, the further down the pyramid you go — because the incremental cost to produce and distribute is the same, and the competition for your specific local audience is lower.

The Production-Cost Collapse

The second thing that happened is that the cost of producing a competent broadcast collapsed.

I want to be careful here, because there is a meaningful distinction between a competent broadcast and a premium broadcast. A nationally-televised NBA game is a multi-million-dollar production. It involves dozens of cameras, a production truck, a full broadcast crew, graphics engines, replay systems, commentator booths, and every piece of equipment a major network can throw at the event. That kind of production is not getting cheaper in a linear way.

What has gotten dramatically cheaper is the mid-tier. The broadcast that used to require a regional-sports-network production budget — a handful of cameras, a produced feed, graphics, replays, a play-by-play team — can now be produced at a fraction of historical cost, using a combination of fixed-camera systems, software-based graphics, remote production, and automated switching. I do not have a widely-disclosed per-game cost comparison I can cite here; operators guard those numbers tightly, and the setups vary enough from venue to venue that a single benchmark would be misleading anyway. What is not in dispute is the direction of the curve.

The cost curve has not just dropped. It has shifted in structure. Historically, a broadcast production was heavy on variable cost — a crew, a truck, a rights-holder fee, per-game expenses. Today, an increasing share of the stack is fixed — software licenses, installed cameras, amortized equipment — with variable costs trending toward negligible. Once the system is in place, the marginal cost of producing one more game is small enough that a team can credibly broadcast every home game it plays, from its AA-level Tuesday night affair to its Saturday promotional giveaway night, without the production economics forcing a choice about which games to carry.

This is the ballgame, to borrow the obvious metaphor. The historical constraint on minor league broadcasting was not demand. It was supply. Teams could not afford to produce enough games for broadcast to matter as a business line. Fans wanted to watch their team, the team could not afford to give them the product, and the distribution layer did not exist to monetize the product anyway.

Remove the production-cost constraint. Remove the distribution-cost constraint. Now what is the shape of the business?

The shape of the business is this: a minor league team, in 2026, can produce every game of its schedule on connected-TV-ready infrastructure, distribute those games through FAST and direct-to-consumer apps at near-zero marginal cost, sell ad inventory against a demonstrably engaged local audience, and generate a broadcast revenue line that, for the first time in the sport’s history, is a real fraction of total team revenue rather than a rounding error.

The team that could have existed in 2026, in other words, is not the team that the 2020 contraction decision was based on.

The Local-CPM Advantage

The third thing that happened is more subtle, and I think more important than the first two.

Local ad CPMs — cost per thousand impressions for a local audience — have held up dramatically better than national CPMs in the connected-TV transition. There is a reason for this. Local advertisers are specific. A local car dealer, a regional bank, a chain of local restaurants, a state-level political campaign — these advertisers do not need a national audience. They need a local audience. And a local audience is exactly what a minor league broadcast delivers, by definition, at high density.

National sports broadcasts have been grappling with a CPM compression problem for most of the past decade. As audiences fragment, national reach gets more expensive per viewer to achieve, and advertisers have plenty of substitutes in digital and social. The CPM a national broadcaster can command for inventory is trending in one direction, and it is not up.

Local CPMs tell a different story. A minor league team in a mid-sized market — pick any city with a AAA club that lost affiliation in 2020 — has an audience that is substantially concentrated in a specific DMA. The fan base is local. The advertisers who want to reach that fan base are local. The match between inventory and buyer is essentially one-to-one, with none of the leakage that national inventory suffers when half the audience is outside the advertiser’s geographic target.

I do not have proprietary numbers I can share here, and I will not invent any. The major programmatic platforms have begun publishing directional data on CTV CPMs for live-sports inventory, but the local-versus-national split on FAST-distributed regional sports is not something any operator has disclosed cleanly. The absence is itself the tell — a market this clearly bifurcated and this commercially consequential would, in a more transparent category, be a published benchmark. What I can say, directionally and structurally, is that the local-CPM advantage is the single most underpriced factor in the current sports-media economy. It is the thing that makes minor league broadcasting an economically live proposition rather than a charitable one. It is the thing that, if you had been tracking it in 2019, would have changed your answer on which MiLB teams were economically viable going into 2020.

Nobody was tracking it in 2019. The measurement layer did not exist.

What the Measurement Layer Could Not See

The MiLB 2020 contraction was made on the basis of a conventional accounting of minor league economics. Gate revenue, sponsorship, concessions, merchandise, rights fees. The conventional accounting produced a conventional answer: these teams were marginal, the player-development subsidy from MLB did not cover the gap for all of them, and the total system cost could be reduced by cutting the bottom third.

The unconventional question — which nobody at the negotiating table could answer, because the tools did not exist — was: if we held everything else constant and layered in a modern connected-TV distribution strategy, what would these teams’ economics look like in 2026?

I think the honest answer is that a meaningful fraction of the cut teams would have been economically viable under the FAST-era distribution stack. Not all of them. Some of the cuts were genuinely correct on the merits — markets without sufficient population, stadiums without sufficient capital maintenance, ownership without sufficient commitment. But some of the cuts were based on a snapshot of broadcast economics that was already obsolete at the moment the snapshot was taken.

The teams that are now operating in the independent leagues — the Atlantic League, the American Association, the Pioneer League, the Frontier League — are running, in several cases, exactly the playbook I am describing. They are producing FAST-ready broadcasts of every home game. They are distributing through a mix of team-owned apps, FAST channel partnerships, and regional connected-TV agreements. They are selling local ad inventory at local-CPM rates against an audience that shows up, in real numbers, on a Tuesday night in a mid-sized city because the team is their team and there is no longer a paywall between them and the broadcast. Team-level independent-league viewership and local ad revenue figures are not consistently disclosed; where individual clubs have published numbers, they are directional rather than comparable.

Whether those teams are thriving on these economics alone — I would not go that far. Independent baseball remains a thin-margin business. But the broadcast line is no longer zero. It is a real, growing, material contributor to the P&L, and it is growing at a pace that the 2020 decision-makers would not have predicted because they did not have the data to predict it.

The Adjacent Cases

I want to widen the aperture, because this is not just a baseball story.

The United Soccer League — USL — has been building out its broadcast infrastructure on essentially the model I am describing. The league’s 2025 national package pairs three CBS network matches and twenty-two CBS Sports Network windows with the ongoing ESPN relationship, while team-level streaming apps and the USL Television Network fill in the long-tail local distribution. USL has also cited an upward trendline in CBS-broadcast match viewership through the 2025 season as evidence that the model is working.

Whether the USL’s current audience is large in absolute terms is not the right question. The right question is whether the audience is large relative to the cost to produce it, and on that metric, the USL is doing something that was not possible under the prior distribution stack. A professional soccer league at the second or third tier of the American soccer pyramid, broadcasting every match of every team on distribution rails that reach the overwhelming majority of connected homes, is a thing that simply did not exist in 2019.

The NWSL’s proposed second-division reserve league, now targeted for a 2027 launch after its original 2026 plan slipped, is another proof point in motion. The infrastructure investment required to broadcast reserve-league matches is, under the old model, prohibitive. Under the FAST model, it is a marginal addition to an existing production stack — and the reserve audience is a highly engaged subset of the main audience, with local-CPM characteristics that ought to behave similarly to or better than the parent league in certain markets. Reserve-league viewership and local-ad-revenue figures will not be reportable until after launch; the thesis is structural, not backtested.

The same pattern shows up in minor hockey (AHL, ECHL), in lower-tier basketball (G League, independent regional leagues), in college sports at the tier below the power-conference media deals, in high school sports at the state-championship level. Victory+’s five-year deal to broadcast the Texas high school football championships globally for free, beginning with the 2025 season, is exactly the kind of distribution that would have been inconceivable on cable, because cable had no economic mechanism to deliver state-championship-level content to a national audience at a production cost the property could support. FAST has that mechanism. The audience followed.

What Should Have Happened

If I could go back to 2019 and put one thing in front of the people making the MiLB contraction decision, it would be this:

The broadcast layer is about to invert. The distribution cost is going to zero. The production cost is going to a fraction of its current level. The local-CPM market is going to survive the cord-cutting transition in a way that the national CPM market is not. The audience for your team’s games — actual viewable broadcasts of actual games, produced at competent quality — is going to be larger, not smaller, five years from now than it is today. Price the decision against that reality, not against the reality of the current RSN-era book.

That conversation did not happen. The tools to have it did not exist in a usable form. The industry trade press of 2019 was still covering cord-cutting as a narrative rather than as a structural reset, and the measurement firms were still producing reports built around the old bundle-era assumptions. The minor league teams making the case for their own survival were doing so on the basis of gate revenue and civic value, not on the basis of a broadcast economic model that had not yet been invented.

The measurement layer has caught up, mostly. Connected-TV measurement is real. Device-level attribution is real. Programmatic reporting on live-sports inventory is real. In 2026, a minor league team making the case for its own broadcast economics has tools available that its 2019 counterpart did not.

The question is whether the system will use them.

The Thing That Is Already Happening

I want to end on something that I think is more important than the regret-cast about 2020.

The structural shift I have described is not hypothetical. It is happening right now, in leagues that had the flexibility to adapt, on platforms that had the distribution to carry it, in markets that had the local demand to sustain it. The USL is doing it. The NWSL and its reserve infrastructure are doing it. The independent baseball leagues are doing it. College sports at multiple tiers below the power conferences are doing it. High school championships are doing it.

The leagues and teams that are doing it are, in aggregate, building the most interesting thing in American sports media right now — a second layer of broadcast infrastructure, below the national rights deals, that is growing at a pace that the existing trade coverage is not fully capturing because the trade coverage is still oriented toward the national-rights megadeals.

The economics of that second layer work. They did not work five years ago. They work now.

The MiLB contraction is a historical event and I am not going to relitigate it game by game. But the pattern it represents — the pattern of making strategic decisions about the survival of small-market sports properties on the basis of a broadcast-economics snapshot that is already obsolete — is a pattern that could repeat. College football is making versions of this decision right now, as conferences realign and tier-two and tier-three programs try to figure out their media futures. High school athletic associations are making versions of this decision as they decide whether to participate in the FAST-era distribution stack or hold out for a cable-era deal that is never coming back. Independent leagues in every sport are making versions of this decision as they decide how much to invest in broadcast infrastructure today against a return that takes time to materialize.

The decision should be made with the right model. The old model — broadcast is a cost center, the audience does not exist, the distribution layer cannot carry small-market content economically — is wrong. It has been wrong for several years. It is getting more wrong every year.

The new model is that a minor league broadcast, properly produced and distributed, is an audience engine operating at costs that make the math work at scale far smaller than anyone assumed was viable under the old stack.

The doors are open. Somebody is going to build in this space, at tier after tier below the national deals, and build something significantly larger than the current coverage suggests is possible. The teams and leagues that figure this out first will look, in retrospect, like they saw something that was hiding in plain sight.

It was. It still is.