It is always about the money

Baseball season opened on last Monday and the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the San Diego Padres by a score of 6-3. The game was played in the afternoon while the majority of Angeles were at work. In essence, 3 out of four people in Los Angeles missed this game. The reason being is that the games are broadcast on SportsNet LA which is owned by the Guggenheim Foundation that purchased the Dodgers for $ 2 billion dollars.

This game, although televised, was essentially blacked out in Los Angeles due to the highest asking price by any cable company, Time Warner, for local TV channels to broadcast a baseball game. Time Warner is asking DirectV and all other satellite and cable companies to carry the Dodgers SportsNet programming for the bundled program fee of $ 5.00/household. If you don't have Time Warner cable, you cannot watch the Dodgers play.

This is the second year of this impasse and the people are grumbling and so is the FCC. Without the Dodgers, the SportsNet channel's programming is not worth $ 1.00, let alone $ 5.00. This feud is starting to shed light on the entire cable and satellite providers and their scam of "bundling" worthless programming in order to charge higher fees for access. The cost to view sports on ESPN in Los Angeles has skyrocketed to $ 13.00/month. If they agree to broadcast the Dodgers, the monthly fee to watch ESPN will be $ 18.00/month whether you watch the Dodgers or not.

The problem is that the Dodgers don't seem to care because the team's owners, the Guggenheim Foundation, is being paid $ 200 million dollars a year on their 25 year, $ 8.35 billion dollars received from Time Warner for all rights to broadcast the Dodger games. So the $ 2 billion dollars paid by the Guggenheim Foundation, which sounded outlandish at the time, appears to be a drop in the bucket and one of the shrewdest business deals in a long time.

Last year, the Dodgers sold 3.8 million tickets to the home games which was a league best and have already sold 3 million tickets so far for this year's season. But the blackout has drastically reduced the number of viewers who can watch the games on TV. This impasse will eventually cost the Dodgers regional fans while causing the FCC to scrutinize the pay per view satellite and cable industries much more closely.

Maybe this will lead to a less costly way of viewing sports on TV and it is called "a la cart".
Let's hope that it does because at present there's no end in sight from the price gouging that these businesses are practicing.

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Mad Man