After 20 months, the company that held the Angels’ television rights emerged from a federal bankruptcy court Thursday, still intact as a company and still holding the Angels’ television rights.
Much ado about nothing? To the contrary.
In the next four years, that company will discover just how many fans are willing to pay for a streaming subscription to watch their favorite team, and how much they are willing to pay for it. Major League Baseball will run the same experiment, with a different handful of teams.
By that time, and informed by that data, MLB should have a pretty good idea of what national media outlets — not just the usual suspects of ESPN, Fox and TBS, but technology giants such as Apple, Amazon and YouTube — might be willing to pay the league for broadcast rights.