Brian Stetler at nytimes.com writes the eye-popping price
tags have restarted debate about a topic near and dear to sports fans,
fairness: many TV customers never watch the mightily expensive channels at all,
yet almost all must pay. There was a shudder in the industry when John Malone,
the business tycoon who helped create the modern-day cable system, said in
November that “runaway sports rights” costs amounted to “a high tax on a lot of
households that don’t have a lot of interest in sports.” The only short-term
fix, he said, was government intervention.
The price increases reflect the leverage big sports leagues
have as distributors like Time Warner Cable and programmers like ESPN
desperately try to hang onto live programming in the age of the digital video
recorder and the Internet.
Sports are the television industry’s bulwark against rapid
technological change: while the companies fear cord-cutting by customers who
can cobble together a diet of TV on the Internet, they rest a little easier
knowing that former customers would be hard-pressed to find their favorite
teams live online.
Pretty much everybody in the business agrees that the
overall costs are outrageous. Nobody has an easy solution.
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