How sports blackouts work

A blackout blocks a specific service or broadcast from showing a game in a specific place. It isn't a switch that makes a game disappear everywhere. The same game can be blacked out on a league's streaming app, available on a regional sports network, and carried nationally — all at once.

That's why "is this game blacked out?" has no single yes-or-no answer. The useful question is which service you want to use, and where you are watching from.

In the major North American leagues, the right to show a team's games locally is usually sold to a regional sports network, or RSN. Examples include YES Network and SNY for the New York teams.

The RSN holds those local rights, and viewers in that team's territory are expected to get the network through a cable, satellite, or live-TV streaming subscription — or through the network's own app.

This is the piece of sports rights that makes a league's all-you-can-watch streaming package incomplete: the league sells the app for out-of-market viewing, while the teams' local rights live with the RSN.

Leagues also sell national windows, and they move between rights cycles. Current MLB examples include Apple TV+ Friday Night Baseball, ESPN/ABC, FOX, NBC/Peacock, and TBS.

A national window can black out the league's streaming app for that game, and a national exclusive can go further and remove the local feed entirely, so the national carrier is the only broadcast route.

A game in a national window is not necessarily unavailable on cable — it depends on whether the window is exclusive and whether the local network was preempted.

Team territories are based on home television territory (HTT), which is keyed to ZIP codes and published by the league. HTT is not the same geography as a Nielsen market, and it doesn't follow city, county, or state lines.

Territories can also overlap, so a single ZIP code can fall inside more than one club's territory, which is why a viewer can land in the home territory of more than one team at once.

A precise answer depends on the exact territory boundary, which is why address-level resolution needs licensed data and careful treatment rather than a guess.

The league's own streaming app carries its own blackout policy, separate from the local network. For MLB.TV, that includes home-territory blackouts (in-market games are blocked, because the local RSN is expected to carry them) and national-window blackouts.

That's why the league's availability data can label a team's own network "out of market" on a home game.

The label describes streaming eligibility on the league's app, not whether the game is watchable on television. Reading it as a viewer-facing answer is the mistake the three-service model exists to avoid — a point covered in more detail in how ZIVO works.

Treat any single provider's message as one data point, not the whole answer. If a game is blacked out on one service, check whether the regional network or a national carrier has it. If you're traveling or watching from a different country, the answer can change again.

ZIVO resolves the country-level routes it can verify for a game and labels the rest as market-dependent.