The state of TV rights to broadcast sports has not been this uncertain in a long time. Unfortunately, many sports organizations, including the Atlanta Braves, made deals with what was Diamond Sports and that has turned into a total disaster for everyone involved. Diamond went bankrupt, managed to keep a lot of their existing broadcast contracts at reduced rates, emerged as Main Street Sports Group, and now the TV broadcast owners are in financial trouble again.
In the past, the issues over TV rights and broadcast fees hadn't really impacted the Braves much as they were highly watched and generally very profitable, so Diamond/Main Street was fine to keep their existing deal in place. However, Main Street Sports' could be forced to shutter very soon and that could leave the Braves without a TV broadcast partner for 2026.
Braves may have to act quickly if TV deal with Main Street Sports and FanDuel falls apart
Now, this is situation is definitely more complicated than just Main Street not making payments on time potentially shutting down. At the moment, Main Street is trying to negotiate a sale to another broadcaster (the favorite rumored to be streaming platform DAZN), but even that is becoming a hangup because any sale seems to hinge on all the impacted sports teams renegotiating their existing deals downward.
The other issue is that no league wants to negotiate a long-term deal with Main Street. At all. MLB seems intent on launching their own brand of RSNs and having as many teams under that umbrella as possible. That means wanting the rights to broadcasts back in the next couple of years and hopefully finding success on their own, but helps create even more uncertainty as MLB tries to find a short-term solution to this very real problem.
For the moment, all of this drama has not impacted the Braves' offseason as they have been extremely active this offseason. However, that could easily change going forward if Atlanta can't guarantee the TV rights side of their revenue stream soon. It may be a while before we get a real sense of where we will see Braves broadcasts in 2026 and how substantially things could change, but it is looking more and more like FanDuel's time as the Braves' TV broadcaster is running out.