"Are rising sports broadcast fees going to lead to pay-for-only-what-channels-you-want?"The above Tweet from Darren Rovell linked to this video on sports rights fees and the possibility of a la carte sports programming in the future.
Whether or not it's through special packages of channels that only subscribers have to pay for or some other means, it's likely that sports fans (and all consumers of media, really) will eventually have to answer the question "How much is seeing that game worth to me?"
In a way, the option already exists, at least to a point. The money I pay to watch baseball online is worth it for me to see the Yankees when they're not on national TV or playing the Red Sox. Even though it costs a lot less, my wife and I decided to not renew our Hoop Streams subscription to watch UConn women's basketball online because the lousy games, uneven streaming and terrible announcing were no longer worth it.
I like to watch boxing on HBO, but we didn't order the channel for that reason; it's just a nice bonus, and I wouldn't have subscribed to it just for that purpose. I also don't think there's a fight I would order a pay-per-view for as opposed to reading about it the next morning or catching the highlights somewhere.
Even our choice of satellite provider and package had at least something to do with sports, as we picked the one with the most options. We also got a lot of channels we never watch, but that's the way it's set up right now.
So how far will this go? Will sports programming move beyond even subscribing strictly to sports packages into pay-per-view for the big events, including eventually the biggest of all ... the Super Bowl?
I don't know the answer to that, but it does seem like there's a lot of untapped financial potential for sports programming, and someday, someone's going to figure out ways to get their hands on more of that money.
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