At long last, baseball fans in the DMV will have a direct-to-consumer option to watch their local teams.
According to multiple reports, MASN, the regional sports network that carries Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals games, has launched a streaming service called MASN+ that will stream all games and studio programming from both teams live beginning on Monday. The Orioles and Nationals were two of three MLB franchises that did not have a direct-to-consumer offering for live games going into this season. Now, only the Houston Astros do not have a streaming service fans can subscribe to for live game broadcasts.
MASN+ is priced similarly to comparable offerings from other regional sports networks. A subscription will cost fans $19.99 per month, or $89.99 for the remainder of the season; a price set a hair lower than its peers given the later launch.
“We are well-aware that fans of both clubs have been clamoring for this, and we are thrilled to be in a position, coming out of some of the agreements with the Nationals, to move this over the line,” Orioles President of Business Operations Catie Griggs said in a statement. “We’ve been working diligently on this, basically for the last 4-6 weeks, to ensure that we could get something out for fans as soon as we possibly can, while recognizing we didn’t want to rush something to market that wasn’t going to work well.”
Earlier this year, the Orioles and Nationals settled a decades-long dispute over their local media rights. MASN, which is majority-owned by the Orioles, has had exclusive broadcast rights to the Nationals since the team moved from Montreal to Washington, D.C. in 2005. For the first time ever, the Nationals will be free to take their local media rights to the open market next season.
“There is not an annual pass, and that was intentional because we do recognize that there is uncertainty about what next year might bring, and therefore we don’t want fans to feel that they’re inadvertently linked into a product that may not be of the same value to them next year,” Griggs said. “We just don’t know what we don’t know there. But we’re very hopeful that we can have productive conversations and continue producing quality broadcasts for both clubs, but we recognize that’s a conversation to be had in the future.”
Ted Leonsis’ Monumental Sports Network, which broadcasts the Washington Wizards and Washington Capitals locally, is seen as one front-runner to secure Nationals rights next year, though that arrangement is complicated by his ongoing efforts to buy the team.
