And there aren't dozens of other channels in the same situation - a small audience being subsidized by the masses? That's the cable TV industry in a nutshell. People have been complaining about it forever.
A loss of subscribers vs low ratings are two different things, the article mentioned nothing about those local networks losing subscribers or fear of bankruptcy. Houston's RSN is available to only 40% of the Houston metro area, they never reached agreements with DirecTV, Dish or U-Verse and it sounds like management of the network has been a huge cluster from Day 1. Seems like more of an isolated incident than the norm, I'm not sure we should be expecting more of the same from other RSNs.
It's an obvious bubble but it's significantly more complicated than newsprint/books/music. The cable industry has a much stronger position since the threat of replacement is also controlled by them as ISPs, especially if net neutrality goes away (which is essentially the cable industry's safety net). A la carte streaming services will be great for consumers but the Netflixes and Hulus of the world are going to be paying out the arse to ISPs if cable TV ever dies (unless Google Fiber starts getting laid out at break-neck speed). That cost will likely trickle down to the consumers thus making a la carte services less attractive and more expensive than they theoretically are today.
There is also no alternative to cable if you're a sports fan. Illegally sharing MP3s was a lot different than illegally streaming a sports game. The quality sucks and it's unreliable. To get legitimate streaming like ESPN3.com you have to have a cable TV deal, services like NBA League Pass blackout local games so they're useless as a replacement if you're trying to watching your local team.
The WWE's network is hopefully a glimpse of the future for all television and sports content but I think we're quite a ways off from that.
Agreed. The line of thinking of chord cutters being a money-saver over time has always been simplistic thinking. Yes, if you're someone that watches absolutely no sports, then just using Netflix and Hulu is a viable alternative to getting cable... as of today. The problem is extrapolating that today's price paradigm is going to continue indefinitely into the future when (a) the country's largest cable companies happen to be some of the largest ISPs (and, call me crazy, but a company like Comcast isn't going to just kill off its cable business without raising prices on its Internet service to consumers and/or instituting more data caps and/or driving up costs of individual websites in a world where net neutrality doesn't exist) and (b) in order for chord cutting to truly compete with cable across the board, companies like Netflix are going to still need to buy much more programming, which means they have more content costs that will eventually get passed on to consumers.
Plus, I don't think people quite understand how valuable sports are *specifically* compared to the programs that you typically see on Netflix and Amazon (which is why cable companies still pay such a massive premium in subscriber fees for sports channels even with smaller audience numbers). We can just look at the UK as a example where they are slightly further along with more alternative streaming options for cable programs and sports with NowTV. Their equivalents of Netflix (movies and old TV programs) and Hulu (more recent TV programs) cost just about the same there as they do here (6.99 GBP per month, which is the equivalent of $11.74 based on the current exchange rate). Pretty comparable to the $9.99 per month for Netflix, right?
Well, here's how expensive sports are a la carte from the EXACT same company in Britain: SkySports (the equivalent of ESPN in the UK, as they hold the most of the top sports rights there including most Premier League games) costs 9.99 GBP ($16.78)... PER DAY.
That's over $500 PER MONTH for just the UK equivalent of ESPN a la carte.
Now, I'm not saying that it's right that the senior citizen women that just want to watch Lifetime continue to subsidize our sports watching. I totally get it from a global perspective that this might be unsustainable indefinitely. However, it goes to show you that, from a pure self interest standpoint, if you watch just ONE sports network, you should NEVER EVER complain about the cost of basic cable. Take one look at what the financial reality of a la carte sports streaming in the UK (which, to be sure, is set up in a way where it's so expensive that it would be insane for any person that watches sports more than once per week to do anything other than just pony up for basic cable). We might be using Internet streaming to view all of our shows in the future instead of cable wires, but it does NOT mean that it's going to end up being cheaper in the long run. We're just going to shift the money from one pocket to another (and it might just be switching pockets between divisions of the exact same company, i.e. Comcast).
