Regional RSN retreat in St. Louis

St. Louis is about to lose the last piece of a TV system that used to put almost every Cardinals and Blues game in one place. Dan Caesar of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the Blues’ Monday, April 13 game against Minnesota is likely to be the final local telecast on FanDuel Sports Network Midwest. (stltoday.com) That network is not just changing names or trimming shows. Main Street Sports Group, the company behind the FanDuel-branded regional sports channels, told teams it will wind down after the National Basketball Association regular season and after the first round of the National Hockey League playoffs. (thedesk.net) In St. Louis, that means the baseball side already left and the hockey side is now nearing the exit. The Cardinals moved their 2026 local broadcasts to Major League Baseball production in February, and the Blues are now the city’s last team still airing on the old regional sports network structure. (stlpr.org) (stltoday.com) Regional sports networks were built on a simple cable-era deal. A channel like Fox Sports Midwest, later Bally Sports Midwest, collected monthly carriage fees from millions of cable homes, including homes that never watched a single inning or shift. (spectrumlocalnews.com) (espn.com) That math worked when pay television bundles were huge. It broke when cord-cutting shrank the number of paying households but team rights fees kept rising, which is why Diamond Sports filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2023 and later reemerged as Main Street Sports Group before falling back into trouble. (espn.com) (fox2now.com) St. Louis saw the crack early when Main Street missed a December 2025 payment to the Cardinals. By January, nine Major League Baseball teams, including the Cardinals, had ended their FanDuel Sports Network deals, and Commissioner Rob Manfred said the league was prepared to produce and distribute those games itself. (fox2now.com) (mlb.com) The replacement is more direct but less unified. Cardinals fans now get local games through Cardinals.TV, while Blues fans still need to navigate a mix that includes FanDuel Sports Network, national windows on Turner, Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, American Broadcasting Company, Hulu, and out-of-market access on ESPN+. (mlb.com) (nhl.com) The Blues’ own “Where to Watch” page shows how fragmented the market already is. It lists FanDuel Sports Network, a direct subscription to that service, an add-on through Amazon Prime Video, national games on TNT, ESPN, ESPN+, ABC and Hulu, plus four over-the-air simulcasts this season on KMOV and Matrix Midwest. (nhl.com) That fragmentation is now big enough that federal regulators are circling the national side too. CNBC reported on April 9 that the Department of Justice opened an investigation into the National Football League over whether spreading games across broadcast, cable, and streaming platforms is hurting consumers on price and access. (cnbc.com) The complaint in football sounds a lot like the problem in local hockey and baseball. When one old local channel disappears, the replacement is usually not one cheaper package but a stack of smaller doors: a team stream here, a national app there, and a separate cable or antenna requirement for the games left outside both. (cnbc.com) (nhl.com) (mlb.com) Main Street’s shutdown also removes actual inventory from the market. The company carried 13 National Basketball Association teams and six National Hockey League teams, and its collapse leaves each club scrambling for a short-term local outlet while the leagues look for bigger, more centralized streaming plans. (thedesk.net) So the likely final Blues telecast on April 13 is not just a station sign-off in one city. It is another mile marker in the end of the regional sports network era, where the old promise was one channel on basic cable and the new reality is a patchwork of league products, national packages, local sublicenses, and multiple monthly bills. (stltoday.com) (thedesk.net) (cnbc.com)