Some do not, but other will run a credit check and require a deposit for low credit if you want a box. If you do not want a box they do not have anything to really risk besides installer time.
Newscorp Buys Into YES Network
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Some do not, but other will run a credit check and require a deposit for low credit if you want a box. If you do not want a box they do not have anything to really risk besides installer time.
I'm having trouble making the font size big enough to read in the thing that you linked, but worth keeping in mind is that a lot "non-sports" channels show a fair amount of sports. The best rated NFL game most weeks is on NBC, for example. The baseball playoffs were split between TBS and FOX. Also, sports are subject to some seasonality- some parts of the year are going to have higher ratings than others. And RSN ratings of baseball and basketball (and to a lesser extent hockey) are often good within their markets and don't get included in the national ratings. If you look at over all ratings for sports in general, with all those adjustments made, I think one would see that it is a big driver of TV audience share.
These networks don't pay billions of dollars to show sports for nothing. A lot of the OTA networks that carry the NFL lose money on the telecasts themselves, because they know they bring in such a big audience that it'll drive viewers to their network and give them a chance to showcase their non-sports programming through advertisements and lead-ins to viewers who otherwise wouldn't be exposed to it.
I think at least half of families who subscribe to pay tv probably have at least one sports fan in the family. And sports fans are the ones least likely to "cut the cord", so they are your core pay tv viewers of the future. Movie and television drama lovers could decide to simply get a Roku box, subscribe to Netflix and/or Hulu streaming, and rent DVDs in some manner to fill the gaps, and do so far cheaper. The future of pay television is in things that people can only watch on television and only want to watch live- sports, news, etc..
I also think sports fans drove the adoption of cable and satellite in the first place, in large measure.
Frankly, if you take sports out of the mix, I'd only be willing to pay about $10 a month for what remains on cable or satellite. Beyond sports and MSNBC, there is little I watch that I can't get some other way for less and in a more convenient way (At least given my lack of a DVR).
Not the case in my area. When I had cable, I had a box and was able to trade it in for an HD box with no credit check. I have out of state relatives with poor credit who recently were able to get 3-4 boxes (One is a "real box" and the others are little things without displays) for all their televisions when some kind of technical transition required the switch (I think the cable backbone for most channels was being changed so that the channels would all be digital and need a decoder, instead of allowing people just to plug a cable cord straight in their televisions).
If they have all scrambled channels (including locals) they have to provide free descrambler boxes.
Who asked for your opinions on the Yankees and Newscorp?
Just discuss the issue at hand. Post your opinions on politics on another site. Post your opinion on a sports team in the Sports Zone on this here site.
Who asked for your off-topic opinions on my off-topic aside?
Isn't there some sort of off-topic complaints about off-topic asides sub-forum for you to post that kind of thing on? What the hell does you credit have to do with the subject matter of this thread?
Nope. I disagree with Dish's discriminatory practices when it comes to people's credit and consider it a net negative for Dish relative to cable. I believe I also mentioned not liking contractual lock-in, channel drops, and the New York Yankees.
What I would like to see is a government mandate that bans credit checks as prerequisites for any transaction with a net value of under $1,000. It's one thing to do it when people are buying a house or a car, which has been done a long time, but only in recent years has it spread to stuff like monthly television or telephone service. Heck, some electric companies now force people to put down large deposits to get electricity- which should *really* be illegal, since electric is pretty much necessary in the modern world, especially in climates that are very hot or very cold.
I'd also like to see a ban on companies advertising things like "Free HD for Life", "Free Installation", and so on and so forth, with a little tiny disclaimer in itty bitty letters that some people might not qualify. I'd basically say you can't advertise anything you won't give everyone. If you're going to charge some people a $99 installation fee, then the ad should say "$99 installation fee!". If you're going to charge some people for HD equipment, your ad should say "Service available in glittering standard definition! HD available for an extra fee.". Make these companies choose between advertising the lowest quality deal they stick people with or changing their policies so everyone qualifies for their best offers.
I think there are some other areas that are without one or more RSN.
I can tell you I personally lost the Big 10 Network (Which I suppose might be considered an RSN) for a week or two, as did customers across large multi-state region. Wasn't a big deal for me, because I'm a Maryland fan, which is a member of the ACC. However, now that Maryland has announced that it's joining the Big 10 in 2014, the network will take on a greater importance for me in the future. If Dish drops them again in 2014 or beyond, I'd probably be forced to drop Dish if I'm still with them at that point.
Discriminatory practices? How did Dish( Yes I realize this may open a can of worms) discriminate against you?
The company has credit standards that are not ambiguous. Put simply most creditors look at over all FICO score or they may use their own rating system.
Typically one can have a decent FICO or even a TU or Equifax score that is middle of the road. The one thing companies look at is on time/not on time payment history. So if one habitually makes late payments. their credit will get dinged. If you don't own a home, you can get a ding
Sports fans are equally likely to "cut the cord"...just as you say, "simply get a Roku box, subscribe to" MLB.tv, NHL GameCenter Live and/or NBA League Pass for less than the cost of a full pay tv subscription. You also get access to archives of those games, like a free DVR. Movie and tv drama lovers, as you point out, can do the same, but for far cheaper than those sports league subscriptions. My point about sports being the brunt of the transmission costs has been made, thank you. Live news? You can get more up-to-date breaking news by following twitter feeds of the established news outlets, without being confined to your pay-tv outlet, DVR, or sling adapter.
That's ancient history, and has no bearing now on the state of the market or technology today. But to go on with your thought, I do agree that they drove the prices of cable and satellite to what they are today, in large measure.
So, you are saying you are willing to pay $40 dollars a month on your sports and MSNBC? (Assuming that you have AT120+ at $49.99 minus the $10 you're willing to pay for the rest of the channels - could be higher if you have a higher package).
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Who asked for your off-topic opinions on my off-topic aside?
You do a good job of making me think, agree or not with you....
You're turning a small aside here into a whole separate line of discussion, which is fine by me, but you're the one who's getting upset that things are going off-topic. The best way to keep them on-topic if off-topic stuff is annoying you? Ignore the small asides from other posters and focus on the issue at hand. That's been my personal experience anyway.
Anyhow, basically, one major definition of discrimination is "the act, practice, or an instance of discriminating categorically rather than individually". That's what Dish is clearly doing- offering one class of people a better deal than another class of people. To be fair, Directv and a lot of cell phone companies and such do the same thing. I'm not accusing them of racial bias or anything (I'm white), but I am accusing them of, well, dividing people into groups and treating people differently when they are in one group than in another. It's hard to deny that they're doing that when it comes to credit scores, even if you approve of the practice.
You've got to remember, too, that you can get poor or unestablished credit without not paying your bills or paying your bills late. I think I've pretty much paid every bill in full and on-time for like a decade now. They just don't like that I'm poor and can't get credit established because I can't get stuff that positively reports when I pay it without some sort of secured card scheme where they want to borrow money from me that I can't afford in the hopes that might establish better credit, with no guarantees that people won't just turn around and say "You're stilll beneath a minimum income threshold, sorry, but thanks for scraping together the money you couldn't afford to give us the big bank a big loan. Hope you enjoyed all those ramen noodles you had to eat some so you could help one of our executives could buy their 11th home.". I really hate the credit system in this country, and it's become less tolerable now that it applies to so many everyday things and not just buying a house or a new car. I know this is off-topic and I'm sorry if it's bothering folks, but someone asked.
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Things like MLB.tv, NHL GameCenter, and NBA League Pass black out live games from the teams who claim your local region. They are fine if you're a Lakers fan living in Kentucky, but not if you're a Lakers fan living in Los Angeles. If you're an Orioles fan in south-central Pennsylvania or Virginia, you don't get live Orioles games or Nationals games on MLB.tv (And probably not Phillies games or Pirates games either in south-central PA example), just games not involving the teams that claim they are local to you. It only works for out of way out of town fans, or fans who don't have a favorite team and just want a bunch of games. I specifically want the Orioles and the Capitals, and couldn't get them from those streaming packages because I live too close to their home cities- the streaming package has to black out those games live because the local rights are owned by the regional sports networks, who paid big bucks for them, and the regional sports networks you get through cable or satellite. And of course NFL is a whole different weird expensive ball of wax that is tough to explain, but that's still best to get through cable or satellite that carry all the big OTA networks and ESPN and NFLN if you like a home team and not a far away team.
One exception is some college sports. I've actually found a lot of University of Maryland games are available streaming, some only available streaming, but that will probably change when they move from the ACC to the Big10, since the Big10 has it's own network it probably wants you to watch on cable or satellite (That's an assumption, I haven't yet looked into that, because the chance doesn't happen until like the fall of 2014).
True, and I do that and read a lot of news articles online, but sometimes it's not a total substitute for the live event television coverage with my favorite analysts giving their perspectives and commentary with audio and video. I think part of that may be that I'm just old enough to remember when I could only get that on television and it's psychologically hard to not have that available.
Yeah, I would be willing to pay that- assuming I also get all the sports on the non-sports stations, like the MLB playoffs on TBS or the NFL on CBS and so on and so forth. I don't think they'd be able to negotiate that in practice, but, yeah, if you could give me an "all the sports" plus MSNBC package with no requisites for more than $10 off (Remember, I did say I'd be willing to pay $10 for everything else), I'd take it, assuming there wasn't some sort of weird issue with it like "We're raising prices $10 for everyone, sports fan can opt out and pay the same as they pay now, but be missing a bunch of channels".
Local blackouts are another old-school outdated system designed to protect local advertising revenue, and are now used by national and regional networks as a draconian measure to control the revenue stream, and not just necessarily in the local area. Are you familiar with the Fox Saturday afternoon MLB contract this year, where they had all the other MLB games blacked out on all other networks and RSNs in that timeframe, whether the games were being aired by Fox or not? If the home team didn't move the game time outside of that Saturday afternoon time window, then NO ONE got to see the game televised. Ridiculous.
The NFL is an entire different animal, as you point out, but I don't know about where you live, but my NFL local team is always shown OTA, even when they are on ESPN MNF or NFLN...one of the local channels simulcasts the game so that those without subscription TV can still see the game.
I agree with a previous poster who points out that live major sports broadcasts bring in a ton of ad revenue and helps subsidize non-live sports programming. What makes no sense about that situation is that if the ad revenue is such a cash cow, then why do the channels' subscription fees have to be 5-10x higher than average non-sports channels? The answer? The spending and out-bidding on exclusive contracts is out of control and not being kept in check compared to ad revenue. They do it because they can, and know the average sports fan will continue to pay. Some of us have had enough and see the writing on the wall. The only way to change a corrupt system is to not keep feeding into it, or let the die-hards who don't care how expensive it really is getting to pay for it themselves.
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I sat down to catch the end of an Orioles game this summer when they'd moved the FOX block to the evening. The local FOX affiliate decided to put on a Phillies game instead. I was pretty livid and e-mailed the station to complain and they said they'd think about it more closely next time, but couldn't promise to go with the O's over the Phillies if a similar situation arose. I live much closer to Baltimore (and Washington, for that matter) than Philly, but across a state line, so various stations pull crap like that all the time on the "regional national" type games with various sports, drives me up a wall. It's at the point where I kind of hope the Orioles and Capitals *don't* play in national/regional games, so I can just watch them on their RSNs (Despite the lesser production quality and exposure for the franchises) and don't have to worry if the local FOX or NBC affiliate is going to randomly decide that my market doesn't want to see my team's game on a given night.
The problem is that only holds true if you live in the *primary* market. I'm in a secondary market. Thus, I need ESPN and NFLN for those games. The league only allows the NFL to simulcast the cable broadcast to a single OTA station in a single city per team. Even if you're clearly in the team's "territory", and it's the closest major city, you're out of luck if you're in a different DMA and don't literally get, for example, the Baltimore station.
They do usually pick the Ravens for the CBS regional game when they're on, but if they're supposed to be on FOX, the FOX affiliate often picks the Eagles. Occasionally the CBS affiliate will even pick the Steelers over the Eagles- their general manager had the nerve to write a letter apologizing to Steelers fans for being forced to carry Ravens road games over Steelers games- as a Ravens fan living an hour from Baltimore and like four hours from Pittsburgh, that letter didn't sit well with me. If I went back to cable, I could get the Baltimore CBS as a significantly viewed channel in addition to my local CBS, which would help some, but the FOX issue would still be there, because the Baltimore FOX isn't available with any television provider locally.
I get what you're saying, but some of us live pretty crummy lives and have to fight too much stuff too often. If I make everything a battle when it doesn't have to be, I'll want to jump off a bridge or something before long. I don't like that cable and satellite raise rates any more than you do, probably less because I probably have less money to spend than you do, but I'm not going to take some weird stand that means I won't get to see my teams' games when I otherwise could. I might switch providers to get promos or keep stations I need to keep to follow my teams, but I'm going to do whatever I have to do within reason to have those games available to me. They're good entertainment. Besides, you're asking for group action, and I don't see it happening- a few stubborn people will refuse to pay, others will not pay because they can't find a way to afford it (I may fall into that category soon); but most will just do what they've always done, rendering token protest actions irrelevant and only really hurting the protesters. Live is too short to miss games and seasons of games over something that in the end will not benefit me.
Sports stations will continue to ask for a lot of money per subscriber whether I have pay tv or don't. And if Dish Network decided not to pay them, they won't get my money. I don't want a service that won't broadcast my teams' games (Or at least most of them). It's not worth it. I can and will switch if that happens. And if ultimately I can't find a way to afford a service that includes my local RSNs and such, I'll pay nobody for television and maybe expand my Netflix subscription to include streaming or get more gas for car or other things I need or want.
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