Fox News has picked up the story
Something that gets bipartisan support — the rising costs of youth sports.
We led last Friday’s send with The Lever’s takedown of Black Bear Sports Group for restricting parents from filming their kids’ games in lieu of using their in-house streaming network, Black Bear TV. The story also touched on private equity’s involvement in youth sports in general.
(If you doubted the impact of the progressive media outlet’s report … it led to a segment on Fox News’ flagship news program.)
I (James) noted in my take that I suspected the report did not encompass the full story.
Narrator: It did not.
The headline: Black Bear does not prohibit parents from taking photos or recording video of their children during their hockey games, a company spokesperson told Buying Sandlot — refuting a social media post by The Lever’s founding editor that was viewed 1.7M times.
"The only restriction is livestreaming, broadcasting, simulcasting, or any other form of transmitting full games or practices," the spokesperson said.
Black Bear operates its own subscription streaming platform — Black Bear TV — inside its 42 owned-and-operated arenas in 11 states across the East Coast and Midwest.
A basic monthly subscription starts at $25.99, so Black Bear definitely has some business skin in the game. But it said consent issues are the main concern.
"Allowing this kind of broadcasting of other children or players is a significant safety risk,” the spokesperson said, “given that it is impossible for our rinks, leagues, and teams to ensure that everyone on camera has given consent, especially young children and their parents."
FWIW: Youth sports parents have sued successfully in the past over streaming without consent. And LiveBarn — Black Bear’s former streaming partner/current competitor and legal adversary — has provided more recent cautionary tales.
A Canadian governmental authority launched a privacy law investigation into the hockey-first streamer earlier this year after several youth summer camps were accidentally streamed at client venues.
LiveBarn said client facilities control when its cameras are operating and it was not at fault by all accounts. But the company still faced the probe and subsequent impacts on its business as it reportedly explores an acquisition.
Black Bear said it only broadcasts a game if it has obtained consent from all participants/parents— something that is certainly much easier to do in the rinks that it owns and operates.
As for the apparent impetus for the report: U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) recently said he was told his child’s hockey team would be penalized if he live-streamed a game against arena policy.
The story did not confirm Murphy’s claim or that it happened in a Black Bear arena. But Black Bear said that while “each instance of a parent recording or broadcasting a full game or practice will be handled on a case-by-case basis,” the “overall” approach is to just ask parents to adhere to the policy.
One last fact check: Black Bear is technically not owned by private equity. Founder and CEO Murry Gunty is the CEO of Blackstreet Capital Holdings, a private equity group that specializes in turning around small and mid-sized distressed companies.
That may be a distinction without a difference to some. But facts matter, especially when you are writing a crusading takedown. You would not say the New York Mets are owned by a hedge fund because Steve Cohen runs a hedge fund.
The Lever — and Jacobin, the socialist magazine that also published the piece — are quite transparent in all-out opposition to all private equity, not just PE in youth sports.
But what the report fails to concede: It is not difficult to find evidence of PE making positive impacts in youth sports.
We have written about many of these examples — LeagueApps, New York Empire Baseball, True Lacrosse, etc.
And if you want to lump Black Bear in as PE — it runs free youth programs and recently bought an arena in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that had closed after its refrigeration system suffered a catastrophic failure, significantly reducing the region’s ice availability. The venue will now re-open next year.
PE is always going to be divisive. And there may be legitimate gripes to be had with Black Bear like all other businesses. But this was a sloppy piece of journalism — albeit one that will still resonate with some.
Last thing: Hockey is sort of its own beast when it comes to youth sports because of how complicated and scarce playing spaces are, much less the costs involved in participation. To use it to draw big sweeping conclusions about the entire industry is a bit foolish.
James’ touched on all the nuance here of what is factual and what’s not. I’d like to double-click on the incentives and rights at play.
The privacy and consent issues are real but also provide a convenient reason for Black Bear to restrict parents from streaming games themselves. We should be honest about that. Still, live streaming providers with fixed installs provide high-quality, generally reliable video of games. There should be a cost associated with that. Everyone loves the good ol’ days, but the good ol’ days didn’t provide low-latency, 1080p video with AI-generated clips of your child.
On the other hand, there’s a larger conversation to be had about rights here. That includes privacy, likeness, and broadcast rights. There are 2 broad approaches here.
Approach 1: Platforms on which you can film and share footage and clips - including TeamSnap, GameChanger, Hudl, Veo - generally say the individual owns the copyright on the video but grants the platform license to distribute and use it for various purposes.
However, there are exceptions. Sideline HD actually goes much further here and says any and all content that you post becomes property of Diamond Kinetics (their parent company). Woof.
Approach 2: Fixed camera installs in privately-owned venues can actually restrict any other rebroadcast of the game itself. Much different. Not only does, say, in this case, Black Bear have the right to distribute the live footage, but it owns the broadcast rights, so to speak. This is more akin to a media outlet owning the broadcast rights in pro and college sports. However, the difference in pro and college sports is that those athletes are generally compensated for participating— often with money generated from said broadcasts!
In the case of youth sports, athletes are paying to participate, often unwittingly signing away their broadcast rights on a very limited basis, and they have zero control on how images are used other than to not participate at all.
Generally, I think this is fair for the narrow use-case of grandma watching the game— if privately-owned facilities spend time and money to install high-end fixed cameras, they have a right to block others from transmitting live. But things get trickier in other use-cases, such as facilities that are part of a public-private partnership, or those that are outside. Taken to the extreme, you can see cases where parents would not be allowed to even take photos and videos of their children, especially if they are participating in a game with broader public appeal and higher monetization potential. In those cases, how much revenue is passed back to leagues, teams, players and families? There’s not really a two-way negotiation happening here the way it is in pro sports. You could argue this is where the NCAA was 20 years ago.
Again, edge cases, but these are things the industry should be thinking about as technology and monetizeable broadcasts enter the fray. At what point do we go too far in the copyright weeds with someone’s child? We’re probably not there yet, but the time is coming.
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