this is exactly where we need to get back to. Sports was getting crowded out of OTA so RSNs became necessary. Now there's so much capacity on OTA that sports just makes sense.
Most RSNs actually have their origins as cablecast channels in the 1970s. The big thing that froze OTA out of local sports was HBO vs the FCC in the 1970s which struck down the FCC's antisiphoning rules that limited how much movies and sports could be cable only, followed by certain companies who created a bidding war by dangling the offer of team specific RSNs to jack up the costs each time they were up for renewal.
The Suns and Mercury are kind of a unique situation since the Phoenix DMA takes up most of the state, and Gray has (or will soon have) stations in the neighboring Tucson and Yuma DMAs. They also have a much smaller TV territory compared to the Diamondbacks, although that will probably change after the Oakland A's move to Vegas and claim exclusive rights to most of Nevada like what happened to the Coyotes, Ducks, Kings and Sharks after the Golden Knights arrived.
It can't really work for other major market sports cities like LA, San Francisco, NYC or Philly where most of the stations are network O&Os which don't have stations in all the DMAs that make up the teams' territories. i.e. the NYC teams include Binghamton, Utica, Elmira and Watertown, and those DMAs are so small that some of the Big 4 along with CW, MyNet and Ion are only available as subchannels, and on really busy nights when NHL, NBA and MLB overlap, between MSG, MSGSN, YES, SNY and their overflow "2" feeds, they need 7 channels to air all the live games. Plus once you get outside of the home DMA of the team, you deal with overlapping territories, like the Buffalo Sabres are also available in all of New York State except for the NYC DMA, most of Connecticut can also get Boston's teams, and much of northern and eastern PA can also get Philadelphia's and Pittsburgh's teams.
