Equipe

THE RSN REBOOT

This week, we're looking at why the regional sports network business is not as doomed as the headlines suggest, and added our best practice to consider.

We're also covering a heavy week of business news across the league and ownership landscape, plus a highlight on how Equipe brings your data together into single profiles for each fan.

— Aaron

📡 THE REGIONAL SPORTS NETWORK REVIVAL

THE FOUR PLUS ONE BEST PRACTICES

The prevailing narrative around regional sports networks is one of decline. Main Street Sports has wound down, leagues are stepping in to manage production in some markets, and the heyday of RSN economics from a decade ago feels increasingly distant.

But a recent Sports Business Journal piece by Joe Lemire makes a different case. Talking with executives at NESN, SNY, Altitude, and Transmit, the article surfaces four best practices that healthier RSNs are using to remain viable enterprises.

THE FOUR BEST PRACTICES

The first is availability. Altitude's Kevin Demoff put it plainly when describing the network's five-year stretch outside Comcast's Denver package, saying you have to "leave economics behind and focus on distribution" before you can build a meaningful economic model. The second is focusing on growth verticals. NESN CEO David Wisnia described cutting in-house web and streaming operations and outsourcing both, turning a multi-million dollar cost center into a profit generator.

The third is building for streaming rather than just porting linear feeds online. Transmit CCO Bo Han framed the shift cleanly, saying linear was about scale and bundling while D2C is about engagement and precision. Dynamic ad insertion alone is generating seven figures of new revenue for most RSNs, and Wisnia noted NESN has doubled its DAI business year over year.

The fourth is reducing churn through year-round content. Carrying teams with offsetting seasons, like MLB and NHL, paired with shoulder programming and reactive live news, keeps subscribers engaged across the calendar. SNY's Steve Raab summed up the underlying principle: fans "want as much as you can serve them."

OUR POV: ADD A FIFTH, USE YOUR DATA

The four practices above are about distribution, cost structure, monetization, and content depth. The thread connecting them is precision. Bo Han is right that D2C lives on engagement and precision, and that younger fans are not anti-ad but anti-irrelevance. Dynamic ad insertion, churn reduction, and shoulder programming all get sharper when the network actually knows who is watching.

That is where most RSNs are still operating in the dark. Streaming subscribers, linear viewers, ticket buyers for the team being broadcast, and donors to the same organization typically live in different systems with different identifiers. The result is a network that can place a targeted ad based on game context but cannot tell that the viewer is also a season ticket holder, a lapsed donor, or a merchandise buyer who has not opened an email in six months.

For teams and ownership groups considering adding an RSN to their portfolio, a unified fan record, one that ties streaming behavior to ticketing, merchandise, and donor activity, turns DAI from contextual targeting into individual targeting. It turns shoulder programming decisions from gut feel into propensity-driven greenlights. It lets a network reduce churn by spotting the subscribers showing early signals of disengagement, not the ones who already cancelled.

The four best practices in the SBJ piece are the foundation. The fifth, the one that compounds the other four, is treating fan data as infrastructure.

PRODUCT HIGHLIGHT

ONE FAN, ONE RECORD

In most athletic departments, a single fan exists as a dozen different people. John buys season tickets with his personal email. He buys a jersey with his university email. He streams a game logged in with his phone number. He donates with his spouse's address on file. Four systems, four versions of John, zero ability to see him as one person.

Equipe MDM stitches those identities back together into one Golden Record.

Equipe pulls in external users from every connected source, ticketing, merchandise, streaming, donor CRM, marketing automation, and runs them through identifier and sub-rule logic your team controls. When two records share an email and a last name, or a phone number and a first name, Equipe links them to the same golden record and recalculates the trusted values automatically.

A few things that make Equipe's approach different:

You own the logic: Activate, prioritize, and customize identifiers and sub-rules directly in the UI. No black box, no consultant required.
Source prioritization is configurable: Trust ticketing data over merch data? Weight your sources, and Equipe respects that hierarchy when calculating every golden record value.
Every value is traceable: See the primary value Equipe selected and every alternate value across the source records, so your team can trust what they are acting on.

The result is the foundation everything else depends on. Audiences, segments, propensity scores, dynamic targeting, all of it. With Equipe MDM and Golden Records, Texas saw an 87.5% reduction in CRM storage usage just from deduplication of records.

🏢 FROM EQUIPE HQ

MEMORIAL DAY

The Equipe team took a moment this Memorial Day to remember the service members who gave their lives in service to the country.

We hope you and yours had a meaningful long weekend with the people who matter most. Thanks to all of those who gave the ultimate sacrifice.

WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING

IPHONES, OWNERSHIP, AND HALF A BILLION

A grab bag of stories from across the business this week. Apple shot an entire MLS match on iPhones, the Blazers ownership shakeup is reshaping one of the league's most-watched front offices, and Matthew Stafford reset the quarterback market with a contract that crosses a line nobody had crossed before.

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📡 The Regional Sports Network Revival