re: Cable Pricing Wars

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Personally, the sports channels dictate my satellite package. If I could get all of the sports channels and a handful of others, I would spend a lot less per month.

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You would probably end up spending more. Think about this:

ESPN charges cable companies about $6 per month per subscriber. The next highest channel is TNT at about $1.50 per month, and the rest fade off quickly after that. ESPN2 is in the top 10 most expensive, the NFL Network is like #4, and Fox Sports 1 is in the top 10. So the bulk of your expanded cable fee goes to the sports channels already. If they move to a truly a la carte option, the first thing a lot of people are going to do is drop all the sports channels (there are a lot more non-sports fans than you realize) to save money, forcing ESPN to increase their already sky-high fees to maintain their revenue since their subscriber base will fall off hard.

The bundling of channels shifts costs around so that all of the non-sports fans currently subsidize your sports channels. That's why any package that includes all the sports channels also includes TNT, TBS, USA, FX, A&E, etc... Who's going to pay $30 for a handful of sports channels when you can pay $35 for 100+ channels? So we have 10 million people paying $350million a month split between all the channels (and about $300million of that is for the sports channels and $50million for the rest in total). Let's go a la carte and say 5 million people decide to drop all their sports channels. Those sports channels still need their $300million, except now it's only split 5 million ways. The sports fans' bills shoot up from $35 to $65. That's a bit high, so they in turn decide to drop all those channels they don't watch, and their bills drop from $65 down to $60. So now all those entertainment channels have lost half their subscribers, and they need to double their rates. Now that $50million gets split only 5 million ways, too, so those people are paying $10/month. The average bill is still $35, except the sports fans who used to beg for a la carte pricing because they don't watch all those 100 bullshite channels are now paying nearly double for only a handful of channels.