That's ultimately what has to give here. Bundling sports channels into cable packages has allowed a bubble to form in the compensation of players and owners. As the article correctly assesses, it is an enormous tax that is passed on to everyone with a cable or satellite subscription.
It's plainly obvious that the exorbitant salaries that players and owners are paid has to go away for the industry to survive.
Generally I start from the point of view that gross mis-pricings where there are multiple buyers and sellers involved are pretty rare. So the various TV organizations are probably paying about as much for sports broadcasting rights as their customers are willing to pay for them. Maybe it's off a bit one way or the other but certainly not by a factor of 10 (as you claimed above).
That's basically what I think unless I'm presented with very strong evidence to the contrary.
Doing anything that involves licensing pro sports is pricy, thats why ESPN is the most expensive cable channel by a long shot. They do have to be vultures about their for reasons that are outside their control (for all we know, they're making an uncharacteristically huge margin too, but even if they weren't the restrictions would probably be about the same).
And I highly recommend you consult with a lawyer before scraping for data if you plan to do anything public with it.
Don't forget that, as a non-sports-watcher, you get to pay a fee to subsidize all the sports channels you don't watch. It's not even the cost of the channels, per se... you get the extra "regional sports surcharge" on top of that.
It does, it just exposes how expensive it is and the sellers don’t like that because it will reduce the number of viewers, and then that starts lowering the value of the ads that are paid for, hence lowering the value of the sports teams themselves.
Bundling sports with other media allowed for price obfuscation.
> Threatened by Internet streaming services and a fragmenting TV audience, Comcast/NBC, ESPN, Fox Sports, Turner, and CBS have agreed over the last 20 months to spend $72 billion for the TV rights to professional, Olympic, and college sports well into the next decade.
> In some TV markets, Abdoulah said, sports channels account for 60 percent of the overall programming costs in the cable-TV bill because of fees for regional sports networks.
What? I Can't believe those prices you're forced to pay. I have Triple Play, 120 Mb/s and a iPad App to view shows/sports separately for 55 euro's a month.
I have always hated the idea that I have to pay ESPN and Disney, services I have zero interest in, in order to have video services from the cable company. It's one reason that I dropped cable for TV. As a former cable insider, I know that these two companies demand the highest per-subscriber fees from the MSO's for their special interest services.
Wow, could this mean the end of overpaid, media-hyped sportspersons being on American TV all the time, and American people actually getting off their asses and going out and reducing the obesity rate? Yay! I hope they cut "free" game broadcasts and force people to pay $1000/month to watch them.
Also, The NFL and the NHL are registered as "tax free organizations", which means that those of us paying taxes have to pay more because these corporations are too greedy to give up a fair share of their (enormous) profits. This makes the hypocrisy of them crying about "free" broadcasts extremely irritating.
Why? How much revenue do the teams and leagues get from TV per-viewer now? Why couldn't they get more by cutting out the middlemen (cable companies and TV networks) and just get subscription fees directly from viewers, and ad revenue directly from advertisers?
Well the cost of broadcast sports is super high because that's the price they can demand. They demand more, and the cable companies have to pay it because who wants to be the cable provider without ESPN or Fox Sports? And then if you want sports on your cable plan, you're paying an extra $100/mo because you have to subscribe to them all so the cable companies can make a profit.
And then you get into the question of the quality of pro sports. Lots of people are unhappy with the NBA and their heavy focus on superstars. Ticket sales are down, and fewer people are watching it on TV as well. The NFL seems to be getting into controversy after controversy that's turning people off. If the players aren't behaving distastefully and if the teams aren't cheating, then there's the whole concussion fiasco playing out right now.
Not to mention a lot of these sports teams lean on non-profit status and taxpayer-funded stadiums. What would have happened if Detroit hadn't funded a replacement for the Silverdome? Taxpayers are getting a bit more wary of where their public funds are going.
None of these things will kill pro sports, but they do lower the value. And it's possible someday a cable company will drop high-priced sports and not suffer any consequences. When that day comes... well the bottom will drop right out of that market.
So cable and all its burdens is just followimg the cordcutters. Please amazon, let the sportsball fools pay their own way. I cut cable partly to avoid paying the sports tax.
I've never heard of this before now. It looks legit. How are they able to remain free? Do they inject more ads than the already existing ones? It's not like TV doesn't already have ads.
EDIT: Okay, looked at the channels. Looks like they just don't have the expensive ones (ESPN, etc). So it doesn't have the sports people want.
And with s contract....
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