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Verizon - do not raise my rates to pay for professional sports

A front page article in today's LA Times suggest we cable TV subscribers can expect rate increases up to 40% simply to cover the cost of professional sports.

This is sheer lunacy and must not happen. The fact that professional sports players receive ludicrously large salaries is something the sports ticket buyers and game watchers should pay for - not people who have no interest in these things.

The article says that all cable subscribers already pay a fair (actually unfair) share of the cost of the sports channel fees, even though many (or maybe most) of us don't watch them and don't want them.

Someone in the cable industry needs to get the message here - as much as you fear a la carte pricing may decrease your monthly take from each subscriber, you may risk losing large numbers of subscribers if you continue to force us to pay for service we do not want.

Comments

Caps09

As much as Verizon may try to keep everyone from having to pay for expensive sports channels, the programmers will not make carriage deals without lots of people getting the channels. Without carriage deals, the games are not available at all, then cutomers leave for a provider that carries them.

So many people think that "a la carte" will amount to a $5 cable bill, but it's just not going to happen. Programmers make deals for the maximum number of subscribers to recieve their channels. Without these revenues, each channel would cost $20 a month to maintain the current level of programming, or they would just disappear altogether.

mm112

That is what has been holding up the BeIn sports deal where i have alluded to that before where verizon will be adding those channels but they also want to make sure that they do not want to end up having to make everyone who has no interest in those channels pay for something that they had no interest in where it could increase the overall cost of their bills. Verizon made the lakers channel deal first because there was a deadline for when the nba season was about to start where BeIn sports is next but people have to realize that al jazeera owns it and they own a bunch of other channels that they are trying to get verizon to add to their guide too. Not every tv provider has al jazeera english but verizon is one of them that does have it along with time warner depending on where you live so you will probably see verizon end up dropping a few channels that are on the guide in order to accomodate the new al jazeera owned channels that could be added soon. It is sort of like when a sports team wants to make a trade for a star player that is on another team where the team who has that player says that they will trade him but only if the team who aquires him will take on additional players and salaries which is sort of what is going on with BeIn sports. There are some tv providers like dish network who have made a business decision to not carry any rsns (regional sports networks) where instead they choose to focus on international sports programming instead because they like most providers know that there is a lot of money to be made from spanish programming. So what that means for someone who is in new york you can not get msg, yes, sny if you have dish network but they will tell you that you can get the nba league pass, mlb ticket or the nhl ticket where you can watch your favorite local teams which is a lie because the games will be blacked out. If you saw a recent story about what is going on with dish network they you are aware that they are talking about a merger once again with direct tv because of the cost of programming and the fact that they are losing customers to verizon and at&t who can offer people a triple play deal that neither satellite provider can match. That might spell doom for blockbuster video who avoided liquidation because dish network bought them. When you take a look at the fios guide and compare it to the competition it is actually quite extraordinary that they can almost match the competition even though fios has been around for only 7 years while a lot of the competition has been around for at least 20 years and in the case of comcast 50 years. Verizon needs to add some more hd and some more spanish (that is not from mexico) and then they will see their customer base increase exponentially. Until then it is up to verizon to try to entice people to stay with them for their triple play.

film111

I really do wish that Verizon could just bundle all the innumerable sports channels into one bundle and let the fanatics pay for it, if they need EVERY sport channel that badly. I don't watch any of them and would be angry as heck if I had to pay even $1.00 extra for them.

Koons1

Everyone has their tastes. Maybe you like 50 movie channels incessantly showing the same movies, or constant reruns of ice truckers or desperate wives of some city or another, or raving lunatics passing as political commentators. Every single customer would love to get rid of at least 90% of the corpus (99% in my case). In the end, we have to decide whether the bill is worth of for the stuff we do like. A la carte will never, ever happen. In some ways, what you want already happens: sometimes, in order to have a single sports channel, one has to subscribe to a whole tier. And God forbid, oh God forbid, that you are unlucky enough to want a foreign channel. Just that is fifteen beans a month.

HockeyFan1

They'll raise the rates when they want more money. Sports have nothing to do with.

bobbo527

@HockeyFan wrote:
They'll raise the rates when they want more money. Sports have nothing to do with.

Sorry fan but you are DEAD wrong. Sports channels are the bigget thing driving higher costs these days. While I do not know the exact amount I believe ESPN(and it's channels) alone cost approx $6.00 per subscriber. Verizon raises rates (or shuffles the tier offerings) when the channels raise their rates. That is what was driving the AMC debacle, AMC wanted more money per subscriber, you don't honestly believe Verizon is going to eat those higher rates do you!?!?!?!?

While I have not seen an updated cost per channel sheet in a few years if you were to look at the cost per channel I beleive almost all of the top 10 most expensive channels are sports related.

Jeembo

^Sort of, but not the entire top 10.

http://newsburglar.com/2007/10/11/cable-television-channel-cost/

Cliffnotes:

ESPN - $3.80/mo

Fox Sports - $2.25/mo

Nickelodeon - $1.40/mo

ESPN2 - $1.05/mo

TNT - $1/mo

SciFi - $1/mo

CNN - $1/mo

Disney - $.95/mo

CNBC - $.90/mo

Bravo - $.85/mo

I wish I could just cut out half of my channels for a cheaper rate. Hopefully the trend of ditching cable tv for Netflix, etc will continue and cable tv prices will actually decrease. Get rid of all the kids channels, the "music" channels, the politics channels posing as news, and the home shopping channels por favor 🙂

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