eagle9903 {l Wrote}:I think an important issue will be whether the sports programming on apple tv is blacked out locally like it would be if you were to purchase NHL Gamecenter or I think MLB TV for your computer.
Huluplus already has pretty great selection of shows and seems to be improving as time goes on.
It will also be interesting to see if you can get things like HBO to go for it. I would think not.
Question around the blackouts will depend on the sports leagues and the agreements with their cable partners.
I think you will always have the local tv blackouts of online streams so the local tv networks can collect their cash from their local consumers.
The bigger question will be around the national tv blackouts.
In terms of "national" broadcast blackouts, you can go down two different avenues.
On one hand you have MLB.TV which only blacks out Saturday afternoon (3-4 games usually) and Sunday Night baseball (1 game) each week. MLB.tv does not currently blackout weekday ESPN games, the weekly TBS game, or anything broadcast on MLB Network (own broadcast/production of games or simulcasts of a local affiliate's feed). Thus MLB.tv is a great option if you live outside of your teams market.
Then you have NHL which has gone full retard. The NHL Gamecenter online package not only blacks out the weekly NBC game (defensible) and every single NBC SportsNetwork game (quasi understandable), but in addition blacks out a game where NHL Network is just retransmitting a local networks feed (flat out atrocious)
So if you are a fan of a decent team that the NHL loves to put on the national broadcasts (NBC, NBCSN, NHLN), you can watch maybe 40% of the team's games live if you have cut the cord and don't have cable anymore.