I see your point but it seems to argue cable’s sides. Sunday Ticket is a niche market and, to most people, NFL Network is probably a niche market too. So why force it, and the subsequent rate hike, on all cable customers instead of just the sports watchers?
What makes GamePlan and Sunday Ticket attractive to me is that you don’t know which games are going to be exciting and which games ordinary until they play them so your chances of finding a great game increases when you have more choices. Plus, if you are a specific fan of an out-of-market team, you better the chance to be able to watch your team play.
I don’t know if I’d shell out $250/yr for Sunday Ticket but if they made it around $100/yr, that would be attractive. Or I’d pay $50/yr to be able to watch games on an internet feed, knowing the picture quality would not be as good but I could still follow what was happening.
I’m not really arguing any side. I’m just throwing around facts and conclusions. I can see the NFL’s side on Sunday Ticket, they want it to be like the other packages, all or nothing, they figure anybody that’s interested in a couple of games on ST will get the whole thing and they don’t want to give them the “cheap” option which leaves money on the table. I can also see the cable companies side, there is clear evidence that because of the way the NFL schedule works ST doesn’t have the same kind of appeal as other packages and needs to be sold differently. Of course then there’s the networks side that don’t want ST sniping viewers from their local commercials, which the PPV method surely would do in much larger quantities than the full package method. Who’s right? All of them.
Same goes for the NFLN argument. Yes you can easily argue that it’s a niche market product, although the NFL is the most popular of the major sports so it’s a big niche. Of course you can make the same argument about all the other sports networks, which include half a dozen different versions of ESPN at least two of which come with almost every “basic” package offered by cable or satellite. On the other side you can easily argue that the one of the points of NFLN is to attract new fans without the baggage (ie negative stories and editorials) they get from the other sports TV sources. And in order to do that they need to be in as widely a distributed area of the dial as possible, especially in areas where there are NFL teams, which happens to be in areas frequently controlled by TW and Comcast.
That’s what makes fights like this ugly. Really, when you get right down to it everybody is right, what everybody wants is what’s good for them, it maximizes their revenue, it maximizes the value they give to customers, and it actually is good for the other side, it’s just not as good as what the other side wants. Mid to late 2009 NFL season is when I predict the great blink will happen. Not sure who blinks first, but that’s when.