E-Sports Aren’t Yet A Threat To The NBA And MLB

We’ve been bullish on the two major league publicly traded sports teams Madison Square Garden (MSG) and its sister company MSG Networks (MSGN) and Liberty Braves Group (BATRK) for a while. We wanted to share our take on what we view as the primary threat to both companies, the rise of e-sports and why we don’t think investors need to be worried just yet.

We believe e-sports is the primary threat investors should be concerned with monitoring. While we have heard and read about concerns over the value of future TV contracts especially in light of declining cable subscriptions, we do not think that is worth worrying about. Live sports, along with news, was the only program category that saw year over year viewer gains and the new entrants in the media landscape such as Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Twitter (NYSE:TWTR), and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) have all expressed interest on bidding on programming rights packages. The real question in our mind is will e-sports become another dominant sports league and erode the value of existing sports franchises.

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