Oh, right. Cable TV. I remember that. I can’t be bothered to deal with an entertainment system that doesn’t let me watch what I went, when I want, how I want and only pay for what I want.
FWIW, NPR covered this story a few weeks ago.
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This is not a very good post. It is a link to a page with a ton of summaries of various stories. The story on that site about ESPN links to another site http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Daily/Issues/2013/08/27/Media/ESPN.aspx and that site is also a ton of summaries of various stories. The story on that site links to a third side http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/207457/sports-fees-dominate-cable-due-to-espn-nfl-netwo.html#axzz2dAoo9uGh which says SNL Kagan says espn gets $5.54 a month but doesn’t offer any evidence of that claim.
Here’s at at least an article in Variety about it: http://variety.com/2013/tv/news/espn-strives-to-maintain-its-lead-as-competition-heats-up-1200577206/
ESPN is a huge business. Per Wikipedia:
As of August 2013, approximately 97,736,000 American households (85.58% of cable, satellite & telco customers) receive ESPN.
You do have to wonder how much of that is due to forced bundling, though the examples Clay Shirky gave of the unbundling dilemma affecting newspapers used the sports section as an example of the thing they wanted – the rest of the news was just included whether they wanted it or not.
A printed paper was a bundle. A reader who wanted only sports and stock tables bought the same paper as a reader who wanted local and national politics, or recipes and horoscopes
So I don’t think the analogy entirely holds, because a lot of people like them some sportsball.
Ooooo, that’s cold, man…
Why couldn’t shows like “Breaking Bad” or “Game of Thrones” continue to thrive in a world where people could pay for on-demand-access to individual programs or episodes? You’d probably even see a drop in the piracy rate for premium cable content if non-subscribers could buy it as easily as they can bittorrent it.
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So at $5.54/month, 97,736,000 households means an annual revenue of $541,457,440. On top of that they still sell commercials - often for a very high price during playoffs etc.
In effect, they merely record and transmit the activities of others - people playing sports. They throw in some commentary and a few interminable shows absurdly over-analyzing every micro-decision of various sports teams, players and manager. My sympathy for poor sad little struggling ESPN is very limited.
Sure, people like to watch sports. I do too, but not for thousands of dollars - I’ll keep my money and spend it on the occasional live ticket.
I guess you’re right, sigh.
Yeah, I’d be curious about that too. I remember just last year AMC got into a big licensing fee dispute with DISH network, so DISH figured they’d just pull AMC off the roster, just in time for the beginning of a new season of Walking Dead. At that point, I walked right off DISH and rejoined DirecTV. Within days (not because I specifically left, obviously) AMC and DISH came to an agreement, but I’ve been happier with DirecTV anyway.
I often wish I knew more specifics about such licensing fees. For the two seasons it was on the air, Masters of Horror was one of the highest-rated shows on Showtime. When it came time to negotiate terms for a third season, MOH wanted to negotiate upward from its relatively puny license fee, but Showtime balked, and so there was no third season.
To a certain extent, it seems like a la carte pricing should work, either on a channel-by-channel basis or even on a show-by-show basis. (Get your hot and fresh Mad Men but hold the Walking Dead please.) But I have no doubt that that would really water down the variety of available content. I’m one of those people who will never, ever have occasion to watch sports or religious programming, nor do I like the vast majority of reality shows. But now that the infrastructure is largely in place, could a system of utter and complete PPV work? Maybe a dollar or two for each episode of Game of Thrones, two bits for an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba! and about three-fiddy for a regular-season NFL game. Plus or minus.
But then again, broadcast journalism was arguably at its journalistic peak when the networks were required to carry a given number of hours of public-service broadcasting per week, regardless of ratings. Trying to make the news programs profitable may not have actually benefitted the viewership in the end. There’s definitely something to be said for “socializing” the schedule by allowing popular programming to subsidize unpopular (but arguably important) programming.
But I wonder how long ago was the last time anyone got into that business with the goal of ultimately enlightening and informing the populace. For some time now it’s apparently been all about making the quickest buck you can and getting out with golden parachute intact before a tiresome inquiry begins.
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But I get charged an extra amount tacked on as a “sports surcharge”. If a newspaper charged extra for the sports section and I didn’t want to read about sports, I could switch to another newspaper. It’s not the same with cable. Even if you switch to what is loosely described as “competition”, the bundling, charges and fees are essentially the same.
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The infomercials are a kick in the ass, aren’t they?
Captive audience. It’s difficult to make a judgement on people who can’t switch the channel.
I’m another person who advocates kicking the TV habit. My life is so much better without the aggravation I experience when stories I’m enjoying are interrupted by advertisements that try to show me how pitiful my life (and how their product will solve that misfortune.) What I end up with is a lot of subtle attempts to make make life seem horrible.
And the fewer TV advertisements I see, the more hateful the remaining ones become.
I have Comcast “High Speed Internet” (hah!) - No TV service. And while I do have a TV set, it’s for playing DVDs and blue-rays I borrow from the public library. I watch (on average) one movie a week. Subscription TV isn’t worth it, especially when you factor in the extra equipment (i.e.: a DVR) that I’d have to manage.
Hey, we were wondering when you’d show up!
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I have been writing and writing and writing and I don’t think I can write any longer.
The Free Network Foundation - http://thefnf.org/
This could become as big as the Free Software Foundation. I’m putting my focus here.
They have the internet on computers now.
The internet has things which free you from the tyranny of cable pricing. Sportsball is the one exception (because of the desire for it to be live) so my solution is: go to a bar and at least get something tangible for your $5.
Because you need to pay for a season before it even starts broadcasting. Who would pay for that without the continuing fees and the combined profits that networks are currently have? If you make a system where people pay much less, there is much less money to make the shows.
We currently have a system kind of like what you propose. It’s called YouTube. And it doesn’t produce network-quality shows.
US cable and satellite companies have nothing on Canadian cable and satellite companies. The Canadian companies own essentially all of the channels on cable and satellite, including the broadcast channels. Even better, they own some of the teams, stadiums, and arenas.
Though Netflix has been producing some good shows lately.
Perhaps a free market for good or crappy shows would be a good thing? A captive market seems to lead to a vast array of utter garbage combined with a small percentage of quality shows - all of them laden with commercials.
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It’s frightening to see how the requirement for news to make a profit has impacted coverage. One of the biggest sources of free material for local newscasts is the city’s sports teams. Last thing any station wants to do is upset the team and lose access to the locker rooms or training camp. So all too often there is a edict that negative stories about teams must be kept to a minimum.
Where I live the NFL owner wants a new stadium even though the current taxpayer provided stadium is barely two decades old. The local media jumped on the new stadium bandwagon, reporting that the government share would be only $200 million. When bloggers and activists got a hold of the contract and did the math, it came out to around $940 million. Eventually the team admitted that $200 million was just the initial payment but the government total would only be $550 million. The difference between $550 million and $940 million is due to current versus nominal dollars. But that doesn’t matter because the local media still reports the $200 million figure.
It doesn’t matter how many times it is pointed out that even the team now admits it’s wrong, the local media simply will not report anything that could endanger their favored status with the team. If there wasn’t pressure to have a profitable news program, they could actually report the news. But since they have to worry about advertisers and sports teams that provide about a third of their broadcast material, we get something that’s almost but not entirely not the news.
