Let's say I don't want to pay for cable or satellite television anymore, because I don't want to pay for the Home & Garden Network, SpikeTV, and hundreds of other channels I'll never watch. I'll gladly pay for a Netflix subscription, buy a Chromecast to watch YouTube and other streaming shows on my TV, and set up an antenna in order to watch over-the-air channels.
Sports is the obvious problem.
This isn't a novel observation, but it's kind of silly that, as someone who lives in Charlotte, NC, it's easier for me -- a cord-cutter as described above -- to watch San Francisco Giants games than Charlotte Bobcats games. Sure, I'm the rare dude who is a fan of those two teams, but there's still something kind of perverse about Fox Sports Carolinas and the NBA figuring it's in their interest to keep me from paying them to watch Bobcats games in order to encourage me to get back on the cable train.
Here's the thing: I'm totally willing to pay them for their sport, and I'm not sure the math supports their position.
Let's say the base price for a season of MLB.tv is $130
Let's say the base price for a season of NBA League Pass is $130.
I'm out of luck for Giants games on cable, but for the Bobcats, to pay for the channels that would get me all their games, I'd have to pay about $70 per month in cable fees, and likely be locked in for a couple years. That's $420 per basketball season.
But can I construct an offer that makes sense for the leagues, the channels, and me? Of course I can, and it's simple: Charge me $12 extra per month for the online packages, and redirect that money directly to the channels.
This should be a no-brainer for Fox Sports Carolinas. "Some dude in Charlotte wants to pay us $2 per month just to watch the Bobcats. Um... yes?" Another $2 would go to TNT. And the rest, $8, would go to ESPN/ABC. All of those networks command much lower subscriber fees than that.
So, let's extend this to the playoffs, too, and say that I'm willing to pay $84 extra per year to get full streaming access, with no blackouts, to Charlotte Bobcats games through League Pass. And let's also say I'm willing to pay $84 extra per year to get full streaming access, with no blackouts when the Giants play Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore, Cincinnati, or on a nationally-televised game, on MLB.tv. That would bring my total to $428 for the two sports packages, which is slightly more than I would pay for just cable over that time period, but far less than I would pay for cable and the MLB.tv package, and the networks in question would all make more money from me than they do now and more money than they would were I simply a cable subscriber.
Clearly, I'm missing something here. I suspect part of the equation is that the networks would prefer someone be an actual cable subscriber more than they want the extra payment. This proposal is essentially a backdoor a la carte option that, effectively, means I'd be paying ESPN $16 per month for seven months of the year, just to get its baseball and basketball programming. Yes, $16 per month via sports leagues' broadband packages is more than $0 or $5.40 per month, but it's also less reliable than $5.40 per month over a full year via a cable provider.
There's also the notion that ESPN doesn't want to do anything to upset cable providers, since ESPN, for all it's power, likely isn't ready to tell Comcast to piss off if it doesn't like what it's doing with its sports league partners. Morever, Comcast owns a bunch of regional sports networks -- including CSN Bay Area, which broadcasts Giants games -- and would much rather get full subscriber money than sports-only subscriber money; they have no motivation to accede to such a plan. I don't know how to deal with that part of it.
(Image cc-licensed: "Kemba Walker, John Wall" by Keith Allison)
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