Dish Network responded in our comment section to the SNY Dish Network standoff. It’s the typical he said/she said that we get whenever a cable or satellite company and a network can’t come to terms with a contract. The only ones that lose in the long run are us subscribers. We lose some days to watch what we want and we end up paying more in fees to subscribe. By no means am I siding with SNY or with Dish Network. I don’t know the specifics of the dispute so I am not going to comment on that part of it all.
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. We understand that it can be devastating to customers when they lose channels that they love. . Since we are dedicated to providing the lowest cost to our customers, there may be times we lose a channel when we are in a contract dispute with a network provider. We understand that this may affect current shows you are watching so we work hard to fight for a fair deal on behalf of our customers and get the channel restored as quickly as possible.Unfortunately, SportsNet New York is putting you in the middle of negotiations be removing their channel. We continue to negotiate with SportsNet New York in hopes of reaching a fair deal. For more information, please visit http://www.iwantmymets.com
Executive Offices of Dish Network
Email: [email protected]
Handwriting is on the wall, don’t count on SNY ever being on DISH again.
They NEVER had YES.
They have been “negotiating” with MSG since October. Sounds like they are never coming back, if you ask me
They probably are getting out of the NY sports business to save $. Why would they just offer SNY & not the others?
Corey,
Dish is so bad, they offer a 7$ Sport Network per month.
One problems all the games are blacked out or out of region. Even the Recording can not be view. You can see Womens Softball or Dan Patrick. Maybe a few highlighs. What a Joke. They better refund my money when I cancel at the end of the month. What am I paying for.We have no baseball outside of ESPN which is standard.
Thanks for your time.
It’s long past time for a la carte cable subscriptions. It would, however, fundamentally alter the economics of professional sports.
Under US law, companies are prohibited from engaging in mandatory bundling of services. This is black letter law, and is what Microsoft got in trouble for in the 1990s. However, the FCC has a rule on the books that allows cable companies to engage in mandatory bundling of channels when selling them to customers, and allows channel owners to bundle the channels they sell to cable companies.
As a result, a company that owns a widely desired channel can not only force cable companies to make every one of their subscribers pay for it (even the ones who don’t want to watch it), but can make all of those subscribers also pay for a half dozen other channels owned by the same company that might have much more limited appeal. Some of these channels would never be profitable if not for the fact that the cable channel owners can force subscribers to pay for them even if they don’t watch them.
With a la carte cable programming, subscribers would pay only for the channels they want to receive. Channel owners would have to balance the competing interests of maximizing subscriber revenue and maximizing the number of households receiving a channel. Something like the Home Shopping Network might give away the channel for free in order to maximize the number of homes that might make impulse buys.
So how would this affect the economics of professional sports? Disney. Disney’s ESPN is the most expensive cable channel, reportedly costing every cable subscriber more than $4/month. Moreover, Disney dictates that if a cable carrier wants to be able to carry ESPN at $4+/month, they also have to pay for ESPN2 at $2+/month (making it the second most expensive channel), and ESPNNews, ESPNU, and ESPN Classic at $1.50/month each. That’s over $10.50/month on the cable bill of every single cable subscriber in the United States going to ESPN, which then turns around and pays billions for broadcast rights to various sports.
So what happens to ESPN’s revenue if non-sports fans stop paying that $10.50/month? What if it turns out that there are lots of casual fans who would pay a couple of bucks for ESPN, but they have no interest in college sports or classic sports? What if, instead of 100% of the cable TV subscribers paying $10.50/month, ESPN is left with 60% of cable TV subscribers paying an average of $5/month, cutting their revenue by about 75%?
The answer is simple, the market for sports broadcast rights would collapse. Even networks like YES and SNY would have serious problems, since their revenue model is based on collecting significant subscriber fees, then having a broad audience beyond the die hard fans that might tune into a handful of games a season. With only the die hard fans paying for the channels, the channels would be seen in a lot fewer households, and advertisers would pay a lot less. When the market for broadcast rights collapses, the market for player salaries would not be too far behind, as no team would get the sort of revenue needed to pay a single player $10 million per year.
The question is, as sports fans, are we prepared to go down that rabbit hole? Personally, I think we should. Players would still earn a quite decent living, but we wouldn’t have the extreme economic distortions we now have, in which non-sports fans are effectively subsidizing high salaries for athletes…
-JMP
Cannot agree with you more. Something is very, very wrong when a professional athlete is earning more per year than an Emergency Room Doctor.
I would love to see al la carte subscriptions from DirecTv. I would likely eliminate 2/3 of the channels I currently have (Goodbye to Logo, many different home shopping channels, many different variations of Disney Channels, MTV, VH1, ESPN Classic, etc.). I am pretty sure I would not pick up any channels I do not currently have.