Blackout (broadcasting)
In
It is particularly prevalent in the broadcasting of sports events, although other television or radio programs may be blacked out as well. Most blackout policies serve to protect local broadcasters (primarily regional sports networks) from competition by "out-of-market" networks that carry different teams, by only allowing viewers to watch non-national telecasts of teams within their designated markets (with television providers blacking out regional telecasts of teams that are outside their market; in turn, encouraging viewers to purchase subscription-based out-of-market sports packages), and by allowing teams to black out national telecasts of games that are also being shown by a local broadcaster.
By contrast, some blackout policies, such as those of the U.S. National Football League and English association football (soccer), serve to encourage attendance to games by respectively requiring that a specific percentage of tickets be sold in order for a game to be televised in the home team's market, or by enforcing a blanket prohibition on any telecast of football matches (regardless of where it is being played) during specific windows.
The term is also used in relation to situations where programming is removed or replaced on international feeds of a television service, because the broadcaster does not hold the territorial rights to air the programs outside of their home country.
Canada
Federal elections
Perhaps the most notable non-sports-related blackout in television was the blackout of
However, in the
Before the 2000 election, Elections Canada moved to reduce the effects of the blackout and the influence of unauthorized knowledge of election results in Western ridings by altering the times that polls close, so that polls no longer close at the same local time throughout the country. Polls in
Provincial elections are not subject to blackout restrictions – in provinces that have two time zones, the vast majority of the population lives in one time zone or the other. Election laws in these provinces stipulate that all polls are to close at the same time – this time invariably being 8:00 p.m. (or 9:00 p.m. in Ontario beginning with the 2007 provincial election) in the time zone of the majority.
On August 17, 2011, Elections Canada Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand suggested improvements of the voting system to Parliament; among them were a proposal to remove the blackout rule. Mayrand argued that "the growing use of social media puts in question not only the practical enforceability of the rule, but also its very intelligibility and usefulness in a world where the distinction between private communication and public transmission is quickly eroding. The time has come for Parliament to consider revoking the current rule."[4][5] On January 13, 2012, it was announced that the federal government would introduce legislation that would repeal the blackout rule, citing the increased use of social media. The blackout rule was officially repealed in October 2015, prior to the 2015 Canadian federal election.[2]
CFL
The Canadian Football League's constitution does provide the option for teams to black out games in their home markets in order to encourage attendance; at one point, the CFL required games to be blacked out within a radius of 120 kilometres (75 mi) around the closest over-the-air signal carrying the game, or 56 kilometres (35 mi) of the stadium for cable broadcasts (and, for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the entirety of the province).[6][7]
The policy received significant criticism in 2002 when the Hamilton Tiger-Cats enforced a blackout on a game against the Toronto Argonauts that had playoff implications; the range of the blackout was considered too wide for the market.[7]
Under the league's 2008–2013 contract with TSN, teams were given a cap on the number of blackouts they could impose per-season (with the number varying by media and CFL reports, ranging from 2 for Hamilton and Toronto, and 5 for teams in Western Canada), and final decisions were assigned to the league if at least 90% of tickets were sold out within 48 hours of the game. Although the CFL stated that the league's current contract with TSN (which began in 2014) does allow for blackouts, they have been seldom-used, if not at all.[6][8]
NHL
As in the U.S., National Hockey League games that are not scheduled as national telecasts by
Until the 2014–15 season, all
Out-of-market games can be viewed using the subscription-based NHL Centre Ice and Sportsnet+; in-market games are blacked out from Centre Ice to protect local broadcasters,[17][18][19] but Sportsnet+ does not black out in-market broadcasts of games televised by Sportsnet since it is a direct-to-consumer version of the Sportsnet channels themselves.[20][21]
Internet television
Many programs carried on
India
Indian law
United Kingdom
Association football
UEFA Article 48.2 and the major association football leagues of the United Kingdom enforce a blackout on all television broadcasts of football between 2:45 p.m. and 5:15 p.m. on Saturday matchdays. This applies to all matches, regardless of whether they are a domestic or international competition. A match which kicks off within the window may be joined in progress once the blackout window ends.[27][28]
This policy is ostensibly intended to encourage fans to attend football matches in-person, especially in lower divisions that compete with top-flight matches on television. The practice originated in the 1960s; Burnley chairman Bob Lord was opposed to television broadcasts of football matches — going as far as banning the BBC from televising Match of the Day from Turf Moor for a time. He pushed the Football League to adopt this stance as an organization-wide policy; it has since been adopted by The Football Association and the current Premier League, which broke away from the Football League in 1992 to become the highest level of club football in England.[29][30][31]
Affected matches can still be broadcast internationally, hence more Premier League matches can be shown outside the United Kingdom by other rightsholders than within. This intricacy created a "
Critics, including
In 2018, after complying by blacking out the first 15 minutes of a
In April 2020, due to the
In 2023, the Premier League sought a rare private prosecution against members of a fraud "gang" who sold £10-a-month subscriptions to retransmitted games. The illegal streams brought in more than £7m in revenue from more than 50,000 subscribers, with five members receiving jail sentences between three and eleven years.[51]
United States
MLB/NHL blackout policies
Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League have very similar blackout rules. Unlike the National Football League, the blackout of games has nothing to do with attendance, but instead is implemented to protect broadcasters with contracts to air games. Unless one of MLB's national partners hold exclusive rights to a certain regular season game (such as ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball or Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball), the local broadcaster of a game has priority over a national broadcaster, and the national broadcast would be blacked out in markets where a local broadcaster is also showing coverage.[52][53] The blackout rules do not apply during the postseason, as there are no regional television broadcasts.
The NHL utilizes a similar policy of exclusive and non-exclusive national games; with the new broadcast deals enacted with 2021–22 season, all regular season games carried by ABC, ESPN, and ESPN+ are exclusive national broadcasts, but selected TNT games became subject to blackouts in the subsequent season.[54] In some cases, national games are scheduled in windows where no other games involving U.S. teams are being played. NHL Network still carries non-exclusive national games, most of which are simulcast from one of the regional broadcasts or a Canadian national broadcast.[55] All games in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs are non-exclusive national games (though with no blackouts of the national broadcaster), after which they are exclusive to ESPN, TNT, or TBS.[56][57]
Out-of-market games can be viewed using the subscription-based
Radio blackouts
In Major League Baseball, there are no radio blackouts. However, for many years, the local radio networks of the two participating ballclubs in the World Series were not allowed to air games, forcing flagship stations, if they wanted to carry the Series, to simulcast the network broadcast. As an example, while Boston Red Sox radio flagship WHDH and St. Louis Cardinals flagship station KMOX both broadcast the 1967 World Series, both stations had to simulcast the NBC Radio broadcast along with Boston's WCOP and St. Louis's KSD, the nominal NBC Radio affiliates in those cities.
This changed after
Additionally, radio stations (including flagships) may not include MLB games in the live Internet streams of their station programming. MLB itself offers radio feeds as a pay service via the league and team websites, along with being a part of the monthly premium fee service from streaming provider TuneIn. Some stations will simply stream the station's regularly scheduled programming that is being pre-empted by the game.
The NHL has no radio blackouts for local broadcasts, although NBC Sports Radio broadcasts are, similarly to some cable broadcasts, not carried within the local markets of participating teams. Internet streaming of radio calls from the NHL's team radio networks, unlike MLB, are allowed to be broadcast for free nationwide with no geoblocking. Also, unlike other leagues, the Stanley Cup Finals (should a team make it to that point in the playoffs) can also be carried on all affiliates of that team's radio network with no restrictions.
NBA blackout policy
Prior to the
NFL blackout policy
The NFL has engaged in various blackout policies to protect both local ticket sales, and local rightsholders of specific games.
Blackouts based on attendance
In the NFL, any broadcaster that has a signal that hits any area within a 75 miles (121 km) radius of an NFL
There have been two exceptions to the rule, of which one has never been implemented and the other no longer applies. The first is for the Green Bay Packers, which have two overlapping 75-mile blackout zones – one surrounding the team's stadium in Green Bay and another surrounding Milwaukee. The team's radio flagship station is in Milwaukee, and the Packers played part of their home schedule in Milwaukee from 1953 through 1994. However, this policy has never been implemented in the Packers' case, as they have sold out every home game in Green Bay since 1960 and have a decades-long season-ticket waiting list (games in Milwaukee also sold out during this period). The second exception was for the Bills Toronto Series; by a technicality, Rogers Communications (the team's lessee) owned all tickets to those games and resold them to potential fans. Even when Rogers failed to sell all of the tickets, they were still technically defined to be sellouts by the league since Rogers was said to have "bought" the tickets. The technicality came into play for both Toronto Series preseason games, and again for the last two regular season games of the series.[62][63] The Bills Toronto Series was cancelled after the 2013 season, largely due to the aforementioned lackluster attendance.
In June 2012, NFL blackout regulations were revised in which, for the first time in NFL history, home games would no longer require a total sellout to be televised locally; instead, teams would be allowed to set a benchmark anywhere from 85 to 100 percent of the stadium's non-premium seats. Any seats sold beyond that benchmark are subject to heavier revenue sharing with the league.[64] Four teams, the Buffalo Bills, the Cleveland Browns, the Indianapolis Colts and the San Diego Chargers, opted out of the new rules, as it would require the teams to pay a higher percentage of gate fees to the NFL's revenue fund.[65] In the 2013 NFL season, the Oakland Raiders began to artificially limit the capacity of Oakland Coliseum by 11,000 in order to improve their chances of meeting the 85% threshold; the seats comprised sections of "Mount Davis", an extended upper deck that had originally been built as part of the Raiders' 1995 return to Oakland. Under NFL rules, the stadium had to remain in this configuration for the entirety of the season.[66]
In the 2015 NFL season, the league, after no games were blacked out at all in the 2014 season, voted to "suspend" the blackout policy as an experiment.[67] The suspension continued into the 2016 season (a season that included the return of the Rams to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as an interim home until the completion of SoFi Stadium; the Coliseum has had long-standing issues with NFL sell-outs); commissioner Roger Goodell stated that the league needed to further investigate the impact of removing the blackout rules before such a change is made permanent.[68] The suspension quietly continued into the 2017 NFL season as well, which saw the San Diego Chargers also relocate to Los Angeles, temporarily using the 27,000-seat, soccer-specific Dignity Health Sports Park (known as StubHub Center before 2019) as an interim venue until the completion of SoFi Stadium for the 2020 season, which is shared with the Rams.[69]
The suspension came a year after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ended a policy that formally forbade multichannel television providers from distributing telecasts of sporting events that had been blacked out by local broadcast television stations. Then-FCC chairman Tom Wheeler considered such policies to be "obsolete".[70] The policies are still enforced via contractual agreements between the NFL and its media partners.[71][72][73]
Exclusivity of local simulcasts for cable and streaming games
Per NFL policies, all games that are exclusively televised on pay television or streaming, including ESPN's Monday Night Football and Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football are syndicated to over-the-air broadcasters in the markets of the teams involved, and blacked out on the cable channel in defense of the local simulcast. The local market for these rights is defined as any station within the 75-mile (121 km) radius of a team's respective stadium.
This policy attracted controversy in December 2007, when
On December 19, 2007, Joe Courtney and other members of the Connecticut Congressional Delegation wrote to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to try to have the NFL allow wider broadcast access to the game.[74] Consequently, on December 26, the NFL announced that the game would be simulcast nationally on CBS and NBC, in addition to WCVB-TV (ABC) in Boston and WWOR-TV (MyNetworkTV) in Secaucus, New Jersey (which is part of the New York City media market)—which had both acquired the local rights to the game.[77]
Although NFL Network would later become more established, in 2014 the NFL began to sub-license the right to produce the Thursday Night Football telecasts, and air selected games from the package in simulcast with NFL Network, to a broadcast television rightsholder (initially CBS). This was part of a move to help heighten the profile of the fledgling Thursday night games.[78][79]
Radio broadcasts
For radio broadcasts, the NFL follows a nearly identical policy to MLB. There are no radio blackouts, but only each team's flagship station can carry local broadcasts during the conference championships or
Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961
In order to protect high school and college football, the federal Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 cancels antitrust protection for television broadcasts of any professional football game on Friday evenings or Saturdays by television stations within 75 miles (121 km) of the venue of a college or high school game occurring in that period.[80] This has the effect of barring nationally televised NFL games in the early part of the season, since virtually all of the country is within 75 miles of a high school game from the second Friday in September through the second Friday in December.
To comply with this law, the NFL largely avoids scheduling games on Saturdays altogether until the final weeks of the regular season (which begin in mid-December), which usually feature several Saturday double- or triple-headers.[81][82][83][84]
Indianapolis 500
To encourage local attendance, the live television broadcast of the Indianapolis 500 is blacked out on the Indianapolis affiliate of its broadcaster (currently NBC station WTHR, and previously ABC station WRTV) if the race is not a sell-out. The station carries the race tape-delayed in primetime.[85]
The blackout has only been lifted four times since live flag-to-flag coverage of the 500 officially began in 1986:
- 2016 (due to a sellout)[85]
- 2020 (due to the race being held behind closed doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic)[86]
- 2021 (due to a sellout with capacity limited to 40% due to the COVID-19 pandemic)
- 2024 (due to a rain delay)[87]
Prior to 1986, ABC had aired an edited broadcast of the race in prime time.[88][89]
Non-sports blackouts
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (January 2021) |
A 1963 episode of the
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