Sports Tears

If there was ever an argument to be made for a la carte pricing, it’s sports programming that makes it.

Specifically, the NFL Network.

It’s not taking the ball and going home to headquarters quietly in the night. You can be sure Steve Bornstein and compadres will be back before next football season trying to jawbone Time Warner, Cablevision and any other resistant cable operators into taking its full lineup of programming at 70 cents a month – or more – even if it only includes eight live games, all year.

If you’re looking at this fee from the standpoint of an average cable subscriber, here’s what the bill starts to look like now and in the near future.

ESPN, $3 a month. ESPN spinoff channels, 35 cents a month. Regional sports network (a la YES Network), $2 a month. NFL Network, 70 cents a month. In the near future, the MLB Network, $1 a month. Regional college network, 50 cents a month. Grand total: $7.55.

All other basic programming networks: Roughly the same total.

Which means it’s clearly time to turn basic cable back into a really basic tier of 70 or 75 channels of news, weather, entertainment and local channels. No sports channels. At all.

Let each sports channel charge whatever they want to charge for their live and recorded events. Let them try to be HBO, if they want. No hidden charges. No hiding their higher ticket prices. Put them out in the open.

Of course, this would take a lot of willpower to enforce on the part of cable operators. Once they buckle on ESPN and include it again on the basic tier, it’s hard to keep the door barred on other sports networks.

But the operator likely would win the popularity contest. Making every sports network an a la carte choice or bundling them all into a separate sports-only tier, as has seemed logical for a good while, would let operators be heroes, dollar-wise, with the customer.

Pricing on basic tiers could be rolled back, as much as by half. True basic for $15 or $20 a month, not $40.

No one ever said live sports was an inalienable right of the TV viewer.

And, similarly, no one ever said sports programmers ever had inalienable access to the TV viewer.

Time for cable operators to make a bottom line stand. And not keep hiding the increasingly high cost of buying tickets to sports events in the cost of basic subscription television.

Sure, some fans will cry rivers of tears for having to pay "extra" for sports. But the costs of capitalistic sports are readily available at open-air stadia: $100 seats, $7 drafts, $10 parking.

Time to start making prices just as explicit for seats at home.