You can’t say you weren’t warned. Back when everybody had cable television and “cutting the cord” was in its infancy, there were observers telling you that the economics of a la carte premium television didn’t pencil out very well and that, soon enough, you’d end up paying as much or more for less television.
That’s not across-the-board true quite yet – if you’re not as discriminating in your cable network viewing and you do the sign-up-splurge-cancel-in-a-month thing, you can get the local TV stations with an antenna, and you’re not a big sports fan, you can save a lot of money cutting the cord. But if you want a cable-like array of linear networks instead of a bunch of on-demand streamers, the price is getting up there. And sports…
Enter the ESPN-FOX-Warner Bros. Discovery service. Finally, you’ll have the option to get many of the cable networks that air live sports in one convenient bundle to add to your other bundles and apps. Just like cable! Except we don’t know the price, we don’t know if it’ll pass anti-trust muster, we don’t know if they’ll do blackouts, and, so far, it won’t include Amazon Prime Video or CBS/Paramount + or NBC/Peacock or any surviving regional cable sports networks, so if you want those, you’ll have to pay more.
It’s amazing. With the technology of today, they’ve invented… cable TV, only less convenient and more confusing. And potentially more expensive, because this bundle can’t count on being included in the basic service of every cable subscriber whether they want it or not (and getting paid for it). Gotta replace that shrinking cable subscriber revenue somehow.
I can’t imagine the three partners haven’t done the research on how much consumers are willing to pay for their sports fix. I also wonder how many sports media consumers are like me: I’ll pay for MLB.tv and NBA Team Pass, but, otherwise, if it’s not part of my cable service or over-the-air, I can live without it. NFL Season Ticket isn’t worth the money when RedZone fulfills my Sunday football needs.
I won’t be without anything in the new service other than what’s on ESPN+, and the NHL and D3 basketball aren’t enough to make me want it. The debut of this thing, if it ever really does happen, will go a long way toward gauging the public’s willingness to spend even more money than it already does on sports coverage.
Good luck to them, but I suspect that what’s more likely to happen – and succeed, much to consumers’ chagrin – is putting premier sports events behind paywalls, and by that I mean a pay-per-view Super Bowl. Come on, you wouldn’t spend twenty or thirty bucks if that was the only way to see the game? You might spend more than that, or go to a friend’s house where they paid for the game, or to a bar which paid whatever astronomical rate the NFL would want from commercial venues.
You don’t want to pay for something that’s been free since the beginning, but most sports have moved from free over-the-air TV to cable – a pay service itself – over the years with nary a whimper. (Some are moving back, but that’s because the regional sports networks are self-destructing.) It might take another decade or two, but it would not surprise me at all to see the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA Finals, or the World Cup go pay-per-view. There’s a lot of money in sports TV rights, but there’s also a lot of pay-per-view money being left on the table.
I don’t, however, see a bundle of news channels being an option for cord-cutters, despite the number of Reddit posts I’ve seen from people wanting to know how they can watch CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News without cable or having to sign up for a cable equivalent like YouTubeTV or Hulu Live.
News junkies have a wide selection of live news channels already available for free online, including ABC and CBS’ digital all-news streams, the BBC and Sky News streams, and local news from a lot of markets. There may be a subscription market for additional or “different” news, like an in-depth or documentary service or an upscale NPR-style analysis network, but if all you want is just the latest news, you don’t have to pay.
And the final issue: Who has the time to watch all of this stuff, anyway? I’m not even working full-time and life gets in the way of watching what I already get. Maybe if the ESPN-Fox-WBD service includes free meal, grocery, prescription delivery, and telemedicine services so I don’t have to get off the couch, I’d be interested. But right now, there are more important things in my life than FS2 and The Ocho.
Perry Michael Simon is a weekly news media columnist for Barrett Media. He previously served as VP and Editor/News-Talk-Sports/Podcast for AllAccess.com. Prior to joining the industry trade publication, Perry spent years in radio working as a Program Director and Operations Manager for KLSX and KLYY in Los Angeles and New Jersey 101.5 in Trenton. He can be found on X (formerly Twitter) @PMSimon.
