There is a particular kind of announcement in Washington, DC, that arrives with great fanfare--and the approximate urgency of a melting glacier.

You know the type. A government agency issues a press release announcing the formation of a task force to study the creation of a committee to explore the possibility of looking into something that everybody in the affected industry figured out and adapted to years ago. If there is even the hint of a belief that said announcement might make a headline or two, a press conference is hastily arranged. The impacted industry nods politely and returns to its lunch.

As the signs next to the government construction sites always point out: “Your tax dollars at work.”

True to this form, the Federal Communications Commission gave us one of those announcements just this week.

TheDesk.Net dropped another in its recent string of scoops when it was first to report that the FCC’s Media Bureau has opened what it is calling “a wide-ranging inquiry” into the “evolving sports media marketplace.” The FCC says in its public notice that it wants to hear about how the migration of live games to streaming platforms is affecting consumers, broadcasters, and access to free over-the-air television.

Chairman Brendan Carr framed it in his customarily folksy way, posting on X that “for decades, Americans enjoyed turning on their TV and quickly finding the game they wanted to see,” before lamenting that watching your favorite team isn’t quite so simple anymore. The agency cited the NFL’s 2025 season as Exhibit A, noting that games aired across 10 services, with some estimates putting the cost of watching every game at over $1,500 for the year. Twenty regular-season games and one playoff game were distributed exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Peacock, and Netflix. The FCC is now soliciting public comment, with the comment period running through March 27th and reply comments due April 13th.

All of this is true, and none of it is news. Not to anyone who has been paying any attention since the 1980s.

Here is where we are obliged to point out — as gently as we can manage — that the sports media migration the FCC has just discovered did not begin with Amazon buying the NFL’s Thursday night games. It did not begin with Apple TV+ inking a deal with Major League Baseball. Or Major League Soccer. It did not even begin in this century. The tectonic shift of live sports away from free, over-the-air television toward subscription services began in earnest in the 1980s, accelerated dramatically through the 1990s, and, as a structural matter, was more or less complete by the time most of us had upgraded to flip phones.

Let alone any of us knowing just what an “iPhone” was.

What streaming has done is add a new — and admittedly more fragmented — layer to a transformation that the broadcast industry, team owners, and sports leagues had already completed long before Netflix mailed its last DVD.

The example we keep thinking about, because it is clarifying and because it happened in the country’s biggest media market, is what happened with the New York Yankees.

From 1951 through 2001 — fifty-one years, give or take — Yankees games were a fixture on WPIX, Channel 11 in New York. Phil Rizzuto. Frank Messer. Bill White. Bobby Murcer. The games were free, they were local, and for generations of New Yorkers, turning on the television and finding a Yankees game on WPIX was as reflexive an act as checking the weather. The Scooter’s non-sequiturs about his wife Cora and cannoli were as much a part of summer in New York as the smell of the subway at rush hour. WPIX was the Yankees, and the Yankees were WPIX, and that relationship was woven into the daily fabric of the city’s life.

Then, on March 19th, 2002, the YES Network launched. The Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network — partially owned, pointedly, by the Yankees themselves through Yankee Global Enterprises — absorbed the team’s local broadcast rights entirely, ending that half-century run on Channel 11. Almost overnight, a free product became a cable subscription product. If you wanted to watch Derek Jeter in 2002, you needed to pay a cable operator to carry YES. If your cable operator was in a carriage dispute with YES — and there were spectacular ones, particularly with Cablevision in those early years, when hundreds of thousands of subscribers were blacked out well into the season — you were simply out of luck. The team was gone from the public airwaves, and it was not coming back.

Notably, the FCC did not launch a wide-ranging inquiry into the evolving sports media marketplace in 2002 under then-chairman Michael K. Powell.

This move was not a secret or a subtle development. The Yankees are the most famous sports franchise in America. WPIX was one of the most-watched independent stations in the country. The transfer of a half-century of local broadcast rights to a cable network partly owned by the team itself was a fairly conspicuous transaction. And it was, of course, just one example among many. Regional sports networks — the RSNs that became the economic backbone of professional sports television throughout the 1990s and 2000s — had been systematically pulling local teams off broadcast television for years before YES ever signed on. Fox Sports Net. SportsChannel. Cablevision’s MSG. The model was the same everywhere: capture the local team, put it behind a cable subscription wall, and let the league’s antitrust exemptions do the rest.

We will note here that the then-FCC Chair Powell was a Republican. Since leaving his FCC post in 2005, you may be surprised to learn that he has been the President of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. That’s the trade group representing the cable and broadband industry.

So when the current FCC Chairman, Carr, expresses concern that Americans can no longer simply “turn on their TV and find the game,” we’d strongly suggest this problem is approximately 25 years old. The first part of it had nothing whatsoever to do with Amazon or Netflix. The streamers are the third act of a play that opened during the Clinton administration. The FCC is arriving at intermission and asking whether anyone has noticed the set changes.

To be fair (and we really try always to be fair — some have suggested it is practically a character flaw), the streaming era has introduced genuinely new complications. The RSN model, for all its consumer-unfriendliness, at least concentrated a team’s games in one place. A Yankees fan in 2005 knew where to find the game: On YES, on cable, full stop. But a football fan in 2025 needed to navigate a rotating door of platforms — some requiring standalone subscriptions, some bundled inside broader streaming packages, some available only on certain nights of the week — to follow a single team through a single season. The FCC’s own estimate of $1,500 annually to watch all NFL games is staggering, and it does not even account for the hardware and broadband infrastructure needed to access half those services.

Forgive the inadvertent pun, but yes — the fragmentation is real, and it is genuinely disorienting for fans.

What is less clear is what exactly the FCC intends to do about any of this. The agency was careful to note that its Public Notice does not describe any specific actions or new rules it might take, which is regulatory-speak for “we are studying the situation.” Last we checked, the Commission doesn’t have any regulatory authority over what appears on streaming services. Witness last week’s checkmate move when Stephen Colbert put his interview with James Talarico on “The Late Show’s” YouTube channel, after CBS’s lawyers lost their spines at the mere suggestion that Commissioner Carr was scrapping the exemption to the “equal time rule” for late-night talk shows. The interview has now been streamed at least nine million times.

The FCC even acknowledged, in what amounts to an admission of its own jurisdictional awkwardness, that it cannot directly interfere with private contracts between sports leagues and streaming services. What it can do is make noise, influence the broader policy conversation, and perhaps use the inquiry as leverage in adjacent fights — like the perennial debate over the national television ownership cap, or the question of whether streaming services that function like cable operators should be regulated as such.

Against that backdrop, an inquiry into sports media fragmentation reads, perhaps uncharitably, as a thinly-veiled attempt to demonstrate the FCC’s rediscovered “consumer-focused relevance.” Whether this is simply the latest entry in what has become a remarkably crowded regulatory docket — one that has somehow found room for equal-time investigations of daytime talk shows and voluntary campaigns for patriotic programming — is a question we will leave entirely to the reader.

What the FCC’s inquiry does do, and what is genuinely useful, is put the relationship between sports programming and the health of local broadcasters on the official record. This is the part of the argument that tends to get lost when the conversation focuses on whether fans can afford to watch playoff football. Local television stations — the ones holding FCC licenses, the ones obligated to serve the public interest of their communities — have long depended on sports programming as a programming anchor and an advertising engine. As live sports have migrated first to cable and now to streaming, local stations have lost not just eyeballs but the economic foundation that helped sustain their news operations and emergency alert capabilities.

In the past few years, some live sports have returned to local broadcast outlets. When the Regional Sports Networks’ economic model was decimated by massive cord-cutting among their audience, some teams tentatively put a handful of their games back on over-the-air broadcast TV. Give group broadcasters Gray and Scripps credit for leading on this model, in partnership with the sports teams looking for any dollars they can find, if only to help cover part of their stratospheric payrolls.

Meanwhile, the Yankees are at Spring Training. Their spring training games are on the YES Network. Their regular-season games will be on the YES Network, where they have been for…some 24 years. The biggest difference between 2002 and now? You can also watch all of this season’s Yankees games streaming on The Gotham Sports App. You can purchase the Yankees’ Season Pass there for the low, low price of $119.99.

Turns out the FCC was a few administrations late in realizing that watching your favorite team isn’t so simple, or so cheap, anymore.

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