On October 1, Hulu and YouTube TV dropped Monumental Sports Network, the primary rightsholder and broadcaster for the Washington Capitals, from their streaming services. Overnight, hundreds of thousands of viewers in the DMV region lost access to all Capitals games not carried by national outlets.
The disruption has been significant, and fans have not been quiet about it. “The greed you’re showing is disgusting,” one person replied to Ted Leonsis on X. “This is ridiculous. The fan has to suffer as billionaires fight over money,” said another. Caps audiences have implored Leonsis to make a deal with Hulu and YouTube TV to get Monumental back on their platforms, but the blocker in negotiations isn’t the ownership group’s greed. The problem is the consolidation of power by a handful of mega-corporations – all orders of magnitude bigger than Monumental Sports – who control what you watch and how.
In this story, everyone is a loser but them.
The long, slow decline of cable TV
YouTube TV and Hulu are internet streamers, but the story begins on cable.
The peak of cable TV was June 2001, when 88.3 million American households had a traditional TV subscription. Since then, the rise of the internet, a battery of economic crises, and COVID have all steadily eaten away at that number. Estimates vary, but the market may have contracted by as much as 40 percent.
Local sports coverage used to be a staple of cable programming. Madison Square Garden Network, the first regional sports network, or RSN, has been around for half a century. The RSN covering the Washington Capitals goes back almost as far. That lineage began with Home Team Sports (HTS) in the early 1980s. In 2001, the DMV’s now-predominant cable provider, Comcast, bought HTS outright, turning it into Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic, an RSN owned and operated by its namesake distributor. Comcast’s strategy at the time was to buy or build RSNs across the country: San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, plus its home base in Philadelphia. In 2011, Comcast bought NBCUniversal and rebranded all those Comcast SportsNet channels as NBC Sports channels – also inspiring the Kabletown arc on season four of 30 Rock. But the RSN market turned quickly.
Fox’s sports networks had been in arrears when they got spun off and branded by the casino company Bally’s in 2020, which then got rebranded by the phone-gambling colossus FanDuel in 2024. The prior year, in the face of bankruptcy, its operating parent company Diamond (now Main Street) unceremoniously cut programming costs and backed out of deals with the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks. AT&T quit the RSN business altogether in 2023. In 2021, MASN, the controversial Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, fired beloved play-by-play man Jim Hunter and eliminated its pregame and postgame shows.
The Caps buy their own RSN
It was in that context in 2022 that the Capitals’ ownership group, Monumental Sports and Entertainment, bought the entirety of NBC Sports Washington, of which it had already owned one-third. Rebranded as Monumental Sports Network, the RSN covered its parent company’s teams: The Capitals, Wizards, and Mystics. Monumental was just one in a long line of sports franchises owning their own coverage, alongside the Bruins, the Cubs, the Orioles and the Nationals, and basically every non-NFL team from New York.
The trend of teams owning their own networks has been a trade-off. Those teams no longer have to beg for coverage, but the coverage itself has become uniformly favorable. On the business side, it has been balkanization; there are now more networks with narrower interests, but without a shared organizing principle. NESN and MASN and MSG and Monumental are each islands unto themselves. They control their own fates, but they don’t have the same collective power as an RSN conglomerate.
Monumental sells ads on its programming, but that is a small portion of its revenue. Most of the cash flow comes from subscriptions, and most of the subscriptions come from cable, which brings us back to Monumental’s prior owner, Comcast, the largest cable company in the US and Monumental’s main distributor. The core business model of a network like Monumental is to sell its content to a multi-channel video programming distributor (MVPD) like Comcast Xfinity in exchange for a per-subscriber fee – a couple dollars per household per month.
Comcast doesn’t publish its subscriber numbers, but it is the biggest cable provider in the US and is particularly predominant – nigh monopolistic – in Maryland, DC, and Northern Virginia. Its subscriber base could be north of three million, and as such, the company commands a lot of purchasing power. A distributor at Comcast’s scale gets to dictate terms to content providers, ensuring it always gets the lowest price possible. A network like Monumental wouldn’t be able to sell its programming, whether it be to another distributor or directly to consumers, at a lower price than it offers to Comcast.
Comcast wields similar power in how it packages those networks. In September it moved Monumental from the basic plan to the “Ultimate” tier, a $20 price hike for most subscribers. Monumental was the last in a series of RSNs to get moved off the standard plan; Comcast had done the same to Root Sports and MASN in 2024. Those moves hurt RSNs; they do not get an increase in their per-subscription rate just because the tier costs more. Meanwhile, fewer viewers can now watch Capitals games, and the ones who do pay more. The real winners in the deal are the Comcast executives who have temporarily offset the relentless churn of cord-cutting.
Journalist Cory Doctorow studies how large corporations, once they have locked in a user base, will degrade their own products to shift value to themselves. Doctorow calls this process enshittification.
In January, Comcast approved stock buybacks worth $15 billion.
The new MVPDs in town
When Monumental the company took over Monumental the network in 2022, it inherited deals with Hulu and YouTube TV – the biggest virtual multi-channel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) and therefore the biggest threat to cable’s domination.
vMVPDs are a different animal altogether. One is owned by Disney, a gaping maw of intellectual property. The other is owned by Google, the fourth largest corporation on Earth and about 30 times bigger than Comcast by market cap. They’re regulated, but only nominally, by the Federal Trade Commission instead of the more muscular Federal Communications Commission, which oversees cable. They require no government-granted licenses, and they have no requirement to air public-interest programming. What they have instead is ambition.
“We know how important live sports are to YouTube TV subscribers, but we will not ask them to pay more to continue carrying a channel that very few of them actually watch.”
To put alongside their late-era prestige TV and bingeable trash, streamers have embraced sports programming. Last summer, the NBA enjoyed a bidding war for its rights, ultimately won by Disney (as ESPN/ABC), Amazon, and Comcast (as NBC). According to Jon Ourand, other big streamers were in the mix. Fubo, the soccer-focused streamer, joined forces with Disney and Hulu last month. Netflix shows NFL games on Christmas.
Sports is the long play for vMVPDs, and regional sports networks aren’t part of it. “We know how important live sports are to YouTube TV subscribers,” YouTube said of Monumental in a comment to Axios, “but we will not ask them to pay more to continue carrying a channel that very few of them actually watch.”
YouTube TV and Hulu did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
The removal of Capitals games from YouTube TV and Hulu has been depicted as an overly greedy Monumental Sports Network getting rejected by distributors, but the steady vanishing of other RSNs from vMVPDs suggests something else is going on. In 2020, YouTube TV cut Fox Sports. In 2021, YouTube TV cut NESN. In 2023, YouTube TV cut SportsNet New York. Monumental was one of the last surviving regional sports networks on the platform. In hindsight, its demise was inevitable.
Hulu and YouTube TV clearly want and value sports – they even want local sports coverage – just not from RSNs. And with their globe-bestriding corporate leverage, they can afford to shut off RSNs, starve them of revenue, and then usurp their place.
Last December, YouTube TV announced a price increase, up $10 to $83 per month. Google cited “the rising cost of content” in its announcement. The service cost $50 in 2019 and $35 in 2017. After a decade of burning through cash to capture its subscriber base, Google is hiking prices at the same time it is cutting programming.
A company that once said there was “no timetable” for profitability is now on the clock.
Monumental’s move
Monumental launched its direct-to-consumer (DTC) plan in October 2023 to keep cord-cutting fans close. Monumental subscriptions initially cost $200 a year, but following the Hulu/YouTube TV fallout the price dropped to $180. Just like with any other distributor, the price point of Monumental’s DTC option is constrained by its deal with its primary distributor: the lowest price has to belong to Comcast.
But those price protections were not the sticking point in talks with Hulu and YouTube TV. In a statement earlier this month, Monumental said it “negotiated in good faith, including making significant economic concessions, to keep the channel” on YouTube TV and Hulu. A source close to the situation told RMNB that Monumental offered the largest concessions it technically could. Google and Disney just weren’t interested.
Revenue is important to RSNs, but reach is critical. If games aren’t available to be seen, new fans aren’t available to be created. It’s only after that step that the mercenary factor – i.e. monetizing fans – could occur. Monumental would much rather remain on YouTube TV and Hulu, with access to hundreds of thousands of potential fans to convert. And it certainly would rather have the revenue. New DTC subscribers will not make up the shortfall from the loss.
It’s possible but unlikely that a deal between Monumental and vMVPDs could come in the future. Whether by new sports packages, regulatory pressure, or collective bargaining on behalf of RSNs by leagues, Monumental may one day return to YouTube TV and Hulu, but it would be under different circumstances.
For now, cable and direct subscriptions are how fans must find the Caps. RMNB has assembled a guide on how to watch Capitals games, covering traditional distributors and streaming on all kinds of devices.
