I’m not in the right group. I stubbornly refuse to pay for television – either cable or satellite – so I just don’t fit.
Most of the time, free tv over the broadcast airwaves is satisfactory, since I don’t have enough time to watch a lot of sports anyway. But now, with most of the Major League Baseball playoffs only on cable, I’m left on the outside, having to go to someone else’s house, a sports bar, or just track scores online.
Here’s a long but interesting article about the “sports cable bubble.”
To sum it up, a lot of pepole who don’t care at all about sports are being forced to pay for them through their cable packages. You have buy a “bundle” of programming which most likely includes some channels you don’t want. For some people, that is sports.
But by making all those people pay for sports even if they don’t want it, there is so much money coming in that even average professional athletes can earn millions of dollars a year.
It also means that the pay-tv companies are so profitable that they can force more and more programming into a paid-only format, like what is happening with MLB now. Enough people pay, either willingly or through forced bundles, that those like me don’t have many freebies left anymore.
It’s a balancing act for big-time sports to have enough of your product shown free on tv to get enough interest from enough people that enough of them will pay for it so you don’t have to give it away anymore. Unfortunately, the scales are tipping way in their favor right now.
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