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. 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. All
TNT games were exclusive national broadcasts during the 2021–22 season, but became subject to blackouts the following season. 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. 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. Out-of-market games can be viewed using the subscription-based
MLB Extra Innings,
MLB.tv, and
NHL Center Ice services, as well as ESPN+ for the NHL. In-market games are blacked out from all four services to protect local broadcasters, and (aside from ESPN+, which also carries a package of exclusive national broadcasts simulcast with
Hulu) they do not offer nationally televised games.
Radio blackouts In Major League Baseball, there are 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
1980, as fans of the
Philadelphia Phillies were angry that they could not hear their popular broadcasting team of
Harry Kalas and
Richie Ashburn call the team's appearance in that year's World Series. Their complaints led to a provision in Major League Baseball's next broadcasting contract permitting the radio flagships of the participating ballclubs to produce and air their own Series broadcasts locally. Since then, only the flagship stations of the two participating ballclubs can originate coverage (though their broadcasts, as well as the national English and Spanish broadcasts, are also available out of market via subscription-based packages on such platforms as
MLB.com,
Sirius XM, and
TuneIn). Flagship stations are required to make mention of the presenting sponsor of the national ESPN Radio broadcasts as also sponsoring the team's own broadcasts during the World Series (as of 2016 this is
AutoZone). All other network affiliates of the two clubs must carry the feed from MLB's national partner (currently ESPN Radio). Should another ESPN Radio affiliate exist in the same market, that station can claim exclusivity, forcing a blackout of the team network affiliate from carrying the game, although this is rarely done as listener pushback against the ESPN Radio affiliate blocking the local play-by-play would likely be untenable (for instance in
2016, ESPN Radio O&O
WMVP in
Chicago broadcast the national ESPN feed as expected, but made no move to block the official
Cubs broadcaster
WSCR from carrying local play-by-play, to the point of only mentioning the national coverage existed on their station through promos in national ESPN Radio programming). 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
1998–99 NBA lockout, the NBA and the WNBA used to black out nationally televised games on
cable television within of the home team's market; however, these are now restricted to games on
NBA TV, WatchESPN and other streaming providers.
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 radius of an NFL
stadium may only broadcast a game if that game is a road game (also known as an away game), or if the game sells out 72 hours or more before the start time for the game. If sold out in less than 72 hours, or is close to being sold out by the deadline, the team can sometimes request a time extension. Furthermore, broadcasters with NFL contracts are required to show their markets' road games, even if the secondary markets have substantial fanbases for other teams (like in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, officially a
Baltimore Ravens secondary market, but home to many
Pittsburgh Steelers fans). Sometimes if a game is within a few hundred tickets of selling out, a broadcaster with rights to show the nearly sold-out game will buy the remaining tickets (and give them to local charities) so it can broadcast the game. Other teams elect to close off sections of their stadium, but cannot sell these tickets for any game that season if they choose to do so. As a result, if the home team's game is a Sunday day game, both networks can air only one game each in that market (until 2000, this rule applied whether or not the game was blacked out; however, this was changed because some markets virtually never aired doubleheaders as a result). Usually, but not always, when each network can show only one game each in a market, the two stations work out between themselves which will show an early game and which will show a late game. This only affects the primary market, and not markets in a radius, which always get a doubleheader each Sunday. For the
NFL International Series, the network broadcasting an International Series game will not have the game blacked out for the team's markets as the game is played outside of the United States; however, some blackout regulations do apply. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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". The policies are still enforced via contractual agreements between the NFL and its media partners.
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 radius of a team's respective stadium. When this happens, the cable network affected closes in the region, with cable operators choosing to either leave the space blank for the duration of the game, or replacing it with a relay of another station. This policy attracted controversy in December 2007, when
Hartford, Connecticut CBS affiliate
WFSB was refused permission to air the local simulcast of a
New England Patriots-New York Giants game on December 29, 2007. The game, which was part of the
Thursday Night Football package on NFL Network, would see the Patriots attempt to become the first NFL team since 1972 and the expansion of the regular season to 16 games, to finish the regular season undefeated. At the time, NFL Network was available only on a sports tier of cable provider
Comcast in the immediate viewing areas of the Patriots and Giants. Senator
John Kerry and Rep.
Ed Markey, both of the state of
Massachusetts and fans of the Patriots team, wrote to the NFL as well as Comcast and
Time Warner Cable, to request that the Patriots-Giants game be aired at least on
basic cable in order to reach the highest possible number of television-viewing fans, citing the "potentially historic" nature of the game. Kerry clarified the next week that he did not intend to interrupt current negotiations between the cable operators and NFL. 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. 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.
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
Super Bowl. All other markets must carry the
NFL on Westwood One feed for those games. For all other weeks, within 75 miles of a team's stadium, only stations the team or its flagship station contracts with can carry those games, regardless if the team is home or away. Thus, any competing station that carries Westwood One broadcasts cannot air those games. Like MLB, the NFL makes local broadcasts (except for those of the
Tennessee Titans) available on NFL's Game Pass service and
Sirius Satellite Radio; as a result, radio stations that carry NFL games, from any source, and stream on the Internet are prohibited from streaming games online outside of their DMA, although it seems this provision is loosely enforced in some cases;
WBBM in Chicago and
WWL (AM) in New Orleans regularly air live broadcasts of their teams' games over their Internet stream, as does
WTMJ in Milwaukee with the Packers, though both stations went to a desktop-only streaming policy in 2015 due to the introduction of GamePass and the absorption of the
NFL Audio Pass streaming system into Game Pass. Since the 2022–23 season, WXTB (the Bucs' flagship station) blacks out coverage on all devices unless in the station's coverage area, likely due to the launch of NFL+.
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 after (after 6:00 p.m.) or Saturdays by television stations within of the venue of a college or high school game, that had been announced in a general circulation newspaper prior to August 1 of the calendar year. This lasts from the second Friday in September through the second Saturday in December. To comply with this law, the NFL largely avoids scheduling games on Fridays at all and Saturdays altogether until the final weeks of the regular season (which begin in mid-December), which usually feature several Saturday double- or triple-headers. A notable effect of this law occurred in the
2004 NFL season, where a
Tennessee Titans/
Miami Dolphins game in week 1 was moved up to Saturday, September 11, due to
Hurricane Ivan; presumably to comply with the Act, the game was only broadcast locally, and blacked out on
NFL Sunday Ticket.
Indianapolis 500 To encourage local attendance,
Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) enforces a blackout on the live television broadcast of the
Indianapolis 500 in the
Indianapolis media market if the race is not a sellout. Since
1992, the station that airs the race in the Indianapolis market (
ABC affiliate
WRTV from 1986 to 2018,
NBC affiliate
WTHR from 2019 to 2024, and
Fox affiliate
WXIN from 2025 onward) airs the race on tape delay in prime time, and carries the network's prime time programming in the race's timeslot under special dispensation from the network. Prior to 1986,
ABC had aired an edited broadcast of the race in prime time. The blackout has only been lifted five times since live flag-to-flag coverage of the 500 officially began in
1986, due to sell-outs in
2016, and
2025, a weather delay in
2024, and the
2020 edition being held with
no spectators due to the
COVID-19 pandemic). Until 2001, the same blackout policy applied to the
Brickyard 400, a
NASCAR Cup Series event also held at IMS; at the time, television rights to NASCAR events were sold by the owners of their respective tracks, This policy ended in 2001 when NASCAR centralized the television rights to all events, and sold them in two packages to
Fox Sports and
NBC/
TNT respectively.
Non-sports blackouts There have been examples of U.S. network affiliates selectively blacking out episodes of television programs, typically due to
censorship for political or religious reasons: • Due to then-owner Lamar Life Insurance Company's support of
racial segregation,
WLBT in
Jackson, Mississippi frequently preempted
NBC programming that prominently featured
African American actors or themes of
racial justice. Segments of
NBC News programs containing coverage of the
civil rights movement were blacked out, with the station typically claiming that the interruptions were actually technical faults. In 1969, as a result of these and other instances of biased coverage deemed to violate the
fairness doctrine of the era, the
FCC revoked Lamar's broadcast license and transferred WLBT to a
racially integrated, transitional ownership group. • A 1963 episode of the
CBS television drama series
East Side/West Side, focusing on an African-American couple in
Harlem, was blacked out by network affiliates in
Shreveport, Louisiana (
KSLA) and
Atlanta, Georgia (
WAGA-TV). • In 1997,
WBMA-LP in
Birmingham, Alabama blacked out the
Ellen episode "
The Puppy Episode"—where the title character
came out as a
lesbian—due to concerns over its content. • In 2004,
Sinclair Broadcast Group ordered its
ABC affiliates to not air an episode of
Nightline where anchor
Ted Koppel would read the names of United States casualties in the
Iraq War, arguing that it appeared to be "motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq". • In 2017, NBC owned-and-operated station
WVIT in
Connecticut blacked out an episode of
Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly due to its inclusion of a segment featuring radio host and conspiracy theorist
Alex Jones. The preemption was due to sensitivity issues relating to Jones'
denial of the
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. • Salt Lake City's
KSL-TV—an NBC affiliate owned by the
LDS Church's commercial broadcasting arm
Bonneville International, has a long history of having declined to air specific NBC (and, earlier, CBS) programs that it believed were contradictions of
Mormon values. In most cases, these programs are usually sub-licensed to another station in the market instead (such as
KUCW or
KMYU), preventing them from being unavailable entirely. ==References==