Quote:There’s been some discussion percolating for a while of AT&T moving out of the regional sports network business, and that appears to have kicked up a notch last week. As per a Bloomberg report from Nabila Ahmed, Eben Novy-Williams, and Scott Moritz, AT&T is looking at selling off its RSNs (they have full ownership of AT&T SportsNet Pittsburgh, AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain and AT&T SportsNet Southwest, plus a 40 percent stake in Root Sports Northwest) as part of a larger plan to reduce debt from recent acquisitions like Time Warner.

The Bloomberg piece says there’s some interest from Sinclair, which is in the process of buying the 21 former Fox RSNs (plus a minority stake in YES) and could look to expand their RSN empire even further:

Quote:That would be notable on a few levels. Comcast currently owns seven RSNs (now branded as NBC Sports Regional Networks), the second-largest collection behind the former Fox RSNs, and this would make them an even larger player there. (Charter also owns five, and there are numerous independent RSNs.) And they seem more interested in staying in the RSN game than AT&T does; Ourand notes that Comcast declined MLB’s plan for jointly-operated RSNs. They’ve also been trying some new things in the RSN space recently, from the MyTeams app to over-the-top game packages and acquisitions of talent and programming for the RSNs as a whole.

And it’s worth mentioning that Comcast initially tried a counter-offer for all the Fox assets Disney bought, including the RSNs. And while Comcast didn’t wind up as a final bidder for the whole package of former Fox RSNs, that may have been about those non-YES RSNs being sold as a package; there was discussion at some points during that sale process of selling the RSNs off piecemeal, and the likes of Comcast and Charter were floated as bidders for certain networks that fit with their cable territories.