On The Media

I was disappointed that in your story about ESPN you failed to mention that the network is easily the biggest reason for soaring cable bills. This is especially galling to people like me who never watch sports channels yet are prevented from unbundling their bundled cable bills. The analogy has been made that if your cable system was a grocery store, you wouldn’t be permitted to check out with milk and eggs unless they also purchased bacon. It doesn’t matter to cable operators or ESPN that a customer doesn’t eat bacon. In fact, I would gladly pay higher per-channel fees if I could simply select the channels I actually watched instead of being forced to pay for ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN HD, ESPN HD-2, and the ESPN Classic Sports Channel not to mention Fox Sports, MSG, and the YES Network. I’m sick and tired of subsidizing sports fans when they should be required to pay the entire costs of their obsession.

I'm totally with you on that Michael but I think that would have been out of place for this story.

I would love to hear OTM do a story about this issue though maybe just looking at cable and satellite providers in general.

Given the choice I would also remove religious programming from my satellite package. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who would drop children’s programming, home shopping channels etc.

Quite a while ago (a bit over two years), OTM did a story about unbundling cable.

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2005/12/02/07

Unbundling home shopping channels wouldn't make any difference in your cable bill. They don't pay to be on your cable system and in fact give the cable system a cut of sales made in the system's area of service. That's why your cable system loves them so much.

It also seems to me that religious channels don't pay subscriber fees, either.

Since 1978, ESPN has become a powerhouse in sports media coverage being a 24 hour sports media network. Other networks are dislike the majority of business and hours of coverage sports leagues give ESPN Networks, even though rating have been proven to be higher on broadcast networks. The various sports leagues (NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, NCAA, and PGA ex.) choose EPSN over broadcast networks because ESPN also grants coverage on their website, sports radio stations, ESPN Magazine, and guaranteed coverage on their sports news highlight show Sportscenter. Although ESPN doesn’t offer the most TV ratings they can offer a larger market for sports leagues to display there product. A down side to ESPN being the main source for sports entertainment is that it’s easy for viewers to get trapped into watching only sports that ESPN air, instead of getting different viewpoints of sports entertainment that is offered by broadcast networks. ESPN is also in sports league business because the own a part of the Arena Football League (AFL), which means all televised games are on national TV on one of the ESPN Networks.

It's crazy the number of channels ESPN offers. The more channels they offer the worst the programming becomes. The only sports I watch are soccer (real soccer from Europe) which ESPN doesn't offer and american football which I watch on the the networks. I don't watch baseball, nor NASCAR, not even the women's trick shot magic billiards (LOL), so ESPN is not all that great to me.

I would prefer to just drop them out all together and go on with with my life paying a little less for TV.

I also wouldn't mind to drop a bunch of other worthless channels.