​Bundle Economics Came for RSNs First, National Rights Are NextThe decline in local media rights values to nearly zero for many MLB, NBA and NHL teams —and shrinking spending on entertainment programming— seemingly offers a preview of what a highly consolidated, lower-margin video distribution business is most likely to yield for national sports rights in the years ahead. Remember, the subscriber fees that power national rights spending are the same cable bundle-related dollars once used to purchase local rights and U.S. pay TV subscriptions have fallen from ~100 million in 2016 to ~62 million as of Q2 ’26.Now that “the rigidity of the pay TV bundle and its iron laws have broken down, the laws of supply and demand and economic scarcity are coming for the biggest sports leagues,” Crakes Media founder and JohnWallStreet Advisory advisor Patrick Crakes said. You’re “already starting to see it with Lachlan Murdoch a couple weeks ago saying to the NFL that it’s not going to adjust terms mid-deal.”And yet, rights owners, operators and investors across sport continue to build models predicting 100% growth in their league’s next media rights agreement.Those assumptions are “largely predicated on the idea Amazon, Google, and/or Apple is going to roll out of bed one day and decide to spend triple what they’re currently spending. Given the hyper scaling investments needed in data centers, I don’t know that’s true,” Crakes said. That “changes the value equation.”The value of national media deals has increased dramatically for the biggest U.S. leagues over the last decade. That, along with fast rising franchise valuations, has helped to mask the decline in local rights revenue and RSN game inventory.For context, teams are now getting “four million dollars, five million dollars for deals that used to be worth $50 million dollars, ten cents on the dollar literally,” former Fox Sports Networks president Bob Thompson said. So, “once you boil it down to a per-game basis, the value of a given league’s national rights deal versus what the teams collectively used to reap with their local rights, the total TV revenue line for many teams has shrunk.” The ongoing push into stadium adjacent mixed-use real estate development is largely an effort to offset the lost revenues. But winter is coming.Few of the established sports rights distributors “can afford to pay leagues the large increases they’re going to be seeking the next time around, and those that can are too concerned about what is going on in AI and how much cash they need to hold for that,” Thompson said.For properties taking national rights to market in recent years, success often meant securing a deal worth twice the expiring one. However, that seems more like a perfect outcome for most moving forward, even if few executives are willing to publicly acknowledge it.“You can’t look at the engine that powers the economics of this business and the non-replacement fro