Will there ever be one dominant streaming service?

[Schpyder]

It's unfortunate that the move to streaming hasn't separated out sports into its "own thing". I didn't like subsidizing ESPN and similar when I subscribed to cable and I don't appreciate that various streaming providers are bidding what I consider to be insane amounts of money for rights. I like it even less that they're doing it while simultaneously raising their prices, cracking down on sharing, adding advertisements, and just over all making it a more expensive and worse experience for me as a subscriber. Further, I consider it worse for sports fans too because now they have to subscribe to multiple services to get their entertainment rather than going to a single provider / app and getting everything (at least everything for a given sport / league) in one place. I'm sure it's better for the leagues though because I would assume they are making more money this way since everyone has to pay instead of just those who really want to watch it.

I remember in the pre-streaming era, when a lot of people were arguing that a la carte cable packages would save everyone a ton of money, and things were obviously going to go that way. I made the case then that there was absolutely no business case to be made for breaking up cable packages, so it was never going to happen, absent unlikely regulatory requirements. The early streaming years were a taste of what that would have been like, and guess what? Except for absolutely the single biggest player, everyone involved lost money. Which is why things are reverting to the cable situation of bundled services and ad-funded content.

Yeah, it's an ugly pricing situation. Just for baseball, it''s $120/yr or $30/month or one team for a year for $105/yr. There's no option to stream one game for a few bucks. If you're not committed to spend over $100 a season, they don't even want you to watch at all. Bunch of jerks.

I mean, the reasons for this are pretty plainly obvious, right? If people only had to pay for the specific games they wanted to watch, the league would lose BOATLOADS of money on a streaming service. This is, in fact, the a la carte endgame people weren't ready to admit was inevitable. Of course in this particular case, a lot of this is driven by MLB's continued decision to throw away billions and billions of dollars by not instituting a salary cap, but that's been the case forever.

 

[Schpyder]

That's a funny way to say, "the labour union would never allow a hard cap, thus protecting the incomes of their members, who, after all, are the product MLB is selling".

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the players getting every red cent they can. I just find whining about prices for a league that doesn't even make a passing attempt at controlling costs to be a little disingenuous. If the market of MLB fans can't support those prices, then it'll show up in decreasing revenues. But for now, it looks like the market is actually working to support it.

 

[Schpyder]

Seriously though, I don't understand how anybody watches American Football on TV, and I grew up going to games. It's all ads.

Watching on TV with commentary is the only thing that makes televised games tolerable. Going in person just means you have SO MUCH dead time waiting for the broadcast to come back from commercial. IME going to televised games in person of any major sport in the US is just an exercise in pain. Baseball is probably the least worst, since they tend to do stuff between innings anyway. But sitting at a college football game (or worse, an NHL game, where you don't really have regular stoppages) watching the ref waiting on their headset to get the go-ahead to resume play is just interminable.