A modest proposal for NBA League Pass and MLB.tv

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)

ESPN: Tiger Woods splits from EA

Link: ESPN: Tiger Woods splits from EA

This is a big deal, if not because of the actual lost opportunity, but because of larger branding effects.

First, EA lost NCAA football. Now, they’ve lost Tiger Woods. The good news is that as long as they’ve still got John Madden, FIFA, and the NHL in the fold, EA will remain synonymous with quality sports video games.

However, EA doesn’t have MLB, isn’t winning NBA, MMA, tennis, or auto racing, and though it still owns boxing for now, Fight Night’s potential keeps dropping alongside the real-life sport’s popularity.

All that’s to say: if EA loses Tiger and, thus, its golf-on-console dominance, that’s just one more sport in which EA’s no longer in the game.

(PS: I want a studio to make a series of sports games that all take place in a singular fictional world. That is, create a pro football game with 32 fictional teams. And then, when the studio creates a pro baseball game with 30 fictional teams, it would be in that same world, perhaps with the same lead broadcaster. Bring a Rockstar Games attitude to the commentary and off-field gameplay, and I think you’d have something. The magic trick, of course, would be to create a compelling enough in-game experience to overcome consumers’ apparent feeling that “reality” is the only thing worth playing in the sports-game world.)

College education and the NCAA

There may be a way to kill the NCAA — corrupt institution that deserves to be dynamited — and at the same time address the problem of skyrocketing college costs. I can’t be the first person to think of this, but I could be one of a relative few who would be perfectly happy jettisoning the NCAA in the service of improving universities’ finances and, by extension, their students’.

This would have to start with a public university system, which could then lead to changes at private institutions.

1 — Beef up the junior colleges. Under this plan, junior colleges will become equal partners with full universities.

2 — In the public university system, allow any student who lives in a junior college’s “district” to attend, like an optional public high school. Students may fail and fail and fail, but because it’s optional, they can keep coming back and trying to earn their credits and paying their tuition. It’s key to create “districts” for JUCOs because…

3 — *Deep breath* Make the full universities in the public system only responsible for the final two (standard) years of college education; that is, they will only offer major-specific classes. Admissions to these schools will still be competitive, but will be based on students’ performance in junior college.

Junior colleges can offer their Associate Degrees and a litany of general education and prerequisite classes for a fraction of the cost that full universities charge for those same classes. Leverage that.

Students who test out of prerequisite classes in high school wouldn’t have to take those junior college classes. Some would probably end up at full universities a semester, or even a year early. That’s great!

You know what else is great? If private schools followed the public schools’ lead, there might pop up a bunch of new, competitive, private junior colleges. It would be a whole new tier of education, but one predicated on the idea that the first two years of university could fairly be a lot cheaper than the third and fourth years.

And a happy byproduct would be that with only two-ish years of attendance from students, the “upper” universities wouldn’t be able to field competitive NCAA sports teams, and so it wouldn’t be worth it to keep competing.

Of course, some interests would want JUCOs to affiliate with “upper” schools so that, say, someone attending San Francisco City College and another person attending San Francisco State University would be able to play on the same sports team, but in my fantasy, the legislation creating this tiered system prohibits such partnerships.

The problem with our outrage at PED use is that we often arrive at it after conflating a value proposition with a moral one. It is easy for White Upper Middle Class America to regard cheating at baseball as a significant character flaw, because WUMC America is Baseball’s America, and in Baseball’s America, the outcomes of games and seasons and careers are things that we worry about. Countries like the Dominican Republic do not have a national pastime, because most of the people who live in them are so busy with the requirements of living that they do not have time for amusement, recreation, entertainment, fun. Or, at least, not enough time to afford any amount of worry or angst about them.

David Murphy, of the Philadelphia Daily News, brings it hard concerning others’ “outrage” over Major League Baseball players’ PED use. Dave Zirin also had a good post on the matter, attacking it from a similar angle.