You might as well include ACC, Longhorn Network, and Pac-12 in that list. Coincidentally (?) Dish is now actually using the Pac-12 alternate channels to carry more live games from the other Pac-12 regional channels, that otherwise would not be broadcast on the national Pac-12 feed. So, as Dish is dropping most professional sports content from California teams (along with having already dropped most of the RSN's in the rest of the Pac-12 territory) Dish is doubling down on offering more college sports content. It is all a shell game, to give Dish some positive publicity that makes it look like they still care about sports, while they are in fact continuing to drop more sports channels.
The key word there being "has" (past tense). Aren't some of the college football games still on the (now former) Fox Sports Nets, which Dish no longer carries? It was funny when I was doing beta testing for Dish shortly after those Fox Sports Net channels were dropped. As part of the testing, they would insert old outdated Dish ads that wouldn't show up on a normal subscriber's receiver. So, I would almost constantly see that advertising claim about being able to see "all major Division I football games." In my feedback, I pointed out to Dish that this claim was no longer true. Eventually, they switched to using different ads for testing purposes. The "all major Division I football games" ad and the false ad in the GameFinder app that still listed Multi-Sport as having "over 35 channels" were two of my biggest pet peeves. As far as I know, both of those problems eventually got fixed. In the meantime, I am sure that I annoyed someone at Dish, by constantly reporting the problems with those ads.
The point is that 40% (FCC data) of the country does not have access to high speed Internet therefore streaming is a moot point for those people. In many (most?) cases their only option is DBS. Don't assume broadband is universally available, it isn't.
And that 40% is likely an underestimate. The problem with the FCC data is that if any address in the neighborhood has high speed internet access, then the entire neighborhood gets reported as having access, whether or not every house is actually wired for high speed cable internet.
That line is still totally accurate. As the regional sports networks continue to get heavier, it now takes a lot fewer of them to add up to "a ton."
Dish has chosen a direction to go without the RSN's unless they are add-ons like premium channels, and they are sticking to it. By my count, by Thursday they will have dropped 27 RSN's over the past 20 months and the last 4 RSN days are numbered as part of the base packages. This does add 3 questions that we will all get to ponder over the next year:That line is still totally accurate. As the regional sports networks continue to get heavier, it now takes a lot fewer of them to add up to "a ton."
2) would be counter-intuitive. Dish is making this whole stance of "We don't want our customers to be forced to pay for sports" and then they turn around and voluntarily make the decision to force more sports channels (that are still being carried) into their most popular and most well-advertised base package? I could see the packages remaining just as they are, programming-wise. The price for the + package going forward is an interesting point to debate, though, with so many fewer sports channels in it.
High Speed internet is available via satellite in the majority of the country. I am not sure how good it is, but it has improved greatly through the years. Also high speed is available via cel phone towers. So it is out there in some form for most Americans. But many do not have the money or want to spend it. Here, we have only Spectrum, other than cel tower or satellite and for 100 down & phone, the bill is in the $85 range. That is a lot of money for some. I think it isn't the access to high speed, but affordable high speed. These new low lying satellites that are going up are supposed to deliver that for about $50 a month.
It makes perfect sense to me. Dish is offering whatever sports channels they still have, in an effort to make up for the removal of most of the remaining RSN's. Just like the recent addition of the Draft Kings app and the return of actual content to the Pac-12 alternate channels, this Multi-Sport offer gives Dish some positive publicity about offering more sports content, while they are in fact removing sports channels. The number of channels advertised as being in Multi-Sport (15+) in that ad also gave us a heads-up that more RSN's would be disappearing. (The previous advertised channel count for Multi-Sport was 20+.) The timing of this offer may also give us a heads-up about when the ATT/Root and NESN contracts expire, if that new 15+ number also reflects the removal of those channels. If so, then I would expect all of the remaining RSN's to be gone by the time those five free months end.
