

Move could hurt sports broadcast industry, weaker channels




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II. Pushback From Broadcast Sports, Big Content Providers



NFL postgame
Bundling boosts sporting revenue; eliminating it could hurt professional sports.
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Source: WSJ

Comments     Threshold


By Arsynic on 3/19/2013 9:16:00 AM , Rating: 1
The cable company charges you based on what the programmers charge them. The programmers sell a bundle of channels and the cable companies sell you the same bundle for a profit.

When you go to the store and you want just one beer, you have to buy the whole 6 pack. It's not the grocery store's fault, it's the vendor.

We need to focus on the real enemy here--the greedy networks and programmers packaging 10 shitty channels with a couple of great ones.

Some channels need to die--yes I'm talking about you MSNBC. Why the fuck is this channel still on the air? The Daily Show and Colbert Report fill their target audience's "news" fix.

By morgan12x on 3/19/2013 11:38:09 AM , Rating: 2
Except I can CHOOSE to buy either 1 beer OR a 6 pack. I'm not forced to buy the 6 pack if I don't want it.

By CaedenV on 3/19/2013 11:39:49 AM , Rating: 2
But for the end user there is no recourse against the programmers, just the cable provider themselves.

Personally I have never had cable TV. My parents tried to order it when I was a kid, but the local cable company was so incompetent that they didn't realize that there was a cable line on our street, so we never got it. As an adult I have very much enjoyed Netflix, but we are coming up on the end of that as we have watched just about everything that we are interested in watching on there. I would switch to Hulu but the quality is junk, and I refuse to pay for commercials. Other streaming providers are either too expensive, or simply offer the same stuff that Netflix does.

So our solution? We are going to start our own in-home 'cable company' of sorts. Average cable bill is ~$100/mo, so we are going to dedicate that much a month towards media for a few years. There will be some upfront costs associated with getting a home server, some nice big HDDs in RAID, and some good quality ripping software. But after that DVDs and blurays are dirt cheap these days.
No more commercials, no fear of loosing content due to consolidation or renegotiations, no more quality switching due to bandwidth issues, content easily available on all of our devices, and after we get a decent library up and running then we can cut way back or remove that part of the budget and still have access to all of our content. I think we are oddly at a point again where owning your own content again, it doesn't work for people who like news or sports programming, but for people like us I think it will work quite nicely.

By timothyd97402 on 3/19/2013 3:57:30 PM , Rating: 2
I am continually amazed by people who think their opinion is the right one. I watch a couple of hours of MSNBC on average a day. I know I am in a minority in this regard but there are quite a few other folk who do watch MSNBC. It should be axed just because you don't like it?

I have to pay for several FOX news channels that I never watch. I would like to be able to turn those channels off and not pay for them but I don't think they should be banished just because I have no use for them.

Now as for all those sports channels, I never watch them, ever but I bet they represent about @0% of my cable bill.

By CM40484 on 3/21/2013 8:09:59 PM , Rating: 2

So you are the guy watching MSNBC.

Amazing you are real......

