No Fan Should Be Sidelined

Anyone who pays for TV service should have a choice over what teams they want to follow. And anyone with no interest in sports should not be forced to pay a huge premium for something they don’t care to watch.

No matter who provides your TV service, the relentlessly rising price of sports has already caused everyone’s bill for basic TV to more than double from about $40 to $80 over the past decade. And in many large cities, the cost for fans to keep the same local teams’ games they’ve always had will double still again between this year and next.

Many teams, leagues and conferences will deny their most loyal fans access to games in order to get everyone—whether you’re a fan or not—to pay the soaring price of admission. Every TV viewer should have a choice: Fans should have access to the games they want, and viewers with no interest in sports should not have to pay for what they don’t want.

Huge Money to Teams Comes Out of Your Pocket

Every time a league, conference or team scores a huge payday for TV rights, it comes at every loyal customer’s expense. Look at all these huge price increases that each team, conference or league now wants you to pay just to get the same games as before.

January 2013:The cost of admission to LA Dodgers baseball games inside of every cable or satellite customer’s home is climbing more than 600 percent as the Dodgers will launch yet another LA regional sports network – SportsNet LA – at a cost of at least $280 million per year to local residents. Instead of combining the Dodgers with the Lakers on TWC SportsNet, the team and Time Warner Cable will now cause everyone to pay more than double for two separate networks that are most relevant for less than half the year each.
November 2012: Thanks to a new agreement between News Corp and the YES network the price of admission to Yankees games in everyone’s own home has soared more than four times as much to $350 million every season compared to $85 million before. That’ll mean fans and everyone else will help to foot a new $10.5 billion bill to keep seeing the Bronx Bombers over the long haul.
November 2012: ESPN is nearing a new agreement to carry all of the new BCS college football playoffs for the cool sum of $500 million every year, plus an additional $215 million annually for the Rose, Orange and Champions Bowls, or $7.3 billion all in. It averages out to $608 million every season compared to today’s $495 million, so TV providers’ customers will likely have to pony up the majority of the new $113 million annual deficit and $1.356 billion shortfall over the lifetime of the pact.
November 2012: $9.2 billion and counting, and that’s just for college conferences where most of the teams are already subsidized by public funding. Big Ten, Pac-12, Big 12, SEC and possibly ACC are all shifting member institutions, breaking traditional rivalries, and holding out key games from their most loyal supporters, just so everyone has to pay more to see the same games as before and subsidize their new conference channels. SEC is on the verge of topping them all with a new network and $300 million-plus every season for its football and basketball games; all at fans’ extra expense.
October 2012: NASCAR ups the price for the first half of its race season from $200 million to $300 million every season, meaning telecast partner FOX will want more from TV customers for FOX, SPEED, FX, the new FOX Sports One national network or any other network that carries any races.
October 2012: Basketball is more expensive in Los Angeles than ever before, as the Lakers raise the price of TV admission more than three times as much to $180 million every season and between $3.6 billion and $5 billion overall. All LA families, no matter whether they follow the Lakers or not, will pay approximately $50 extra every season just so the most loyal fans can still see the team.
October 2012: MLB gets double the price from ESPN, FOX and Turner to leave the World Series and playoffs, All-Star Game and regular season telecasts just where they were before. The $12.4 billion bill adds $6.2 billion in new expenses, with everyone who pays for TV having to bear the lion’s share of the extra costs.
January 2012 – January 2011: Big 12 rivals University of Oklahoma gets $70 million per season from Fox and University of Texas get $150 million per year from ESPN to launch new programming services specific to each public school. Many UT fans have needlessly lost football games each season since.
September – December 2011: It costs $42.75 billion for everyone to see the NFL, as the most popular league of all raises prices by nearly double for FOX, CBS, NBC and ESPN to have the same games. Fans will now help to pay off a new $2 billion deficit every season just to get the same as before. And that’s not even counting the expensive NFL Network.

CSN Houston Network Update

We too want to enable any Astros fans to have CSN Houston. If the Astros and Comcast will agree to make the channel available only to those customers who want to pay for it or make it more reasonable for all of our customers, we can have an agreement completed very soon. In the meantime, DIRECTV customers can see some Astros games this season on ESPN or FOX and also hear all the local game action on KBME 790 AM, XM Radio and other regional radio carriers.