• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Charter to Offer Dodgers TV Network to Subscribers

Unfortunately, it still leaves the rest of the disenfranchised viewers -- including those who use DirecTV or Dish Network, Cox Communications, or phone companies AT&T U-Verse and Verizon FIOS -- without the channel.

Presuming Charter inherits the Dodgers deal intact in the merger, nothing changes unless they want to lower the rate to the other providers and eat the difference in revenue to the Dodgers themselves. Time Warner Cable had to do that last season and presumably is doing so this season as well, because of that 70% lack of carriage. The Dodgers have shown by their inaction that they are not interested in renegotiating the revenue from the television channel, and the other providers have remained on their side of the line drawn in the sand.

So Charter is now stuck with a no-win situation: Either lower the rate to the others ... and eat the difference between what the market will bear and what the deal calls for in revenue to the team, or keep hoping the other companies will blink ... and eat the difference between what they get from their own subscribers and what they have to pay the Dodgers.

And it's already almost June. Anyone want to set the odds of the deal being approved before the end of the baseball season?

Absent the Dodgers returning, the only cable/satellite program I would miss if I disconnected service would be Hot in Cleveland, and its final two episodes will air a week from tomorrow. Most of my viewing now consists of the digital subchannel networks; I live close enough to Mount Wilson to get good broadcast reception 98% or more of the time using the ancient antenna in my building's attic, so I figure a one-time $100 or so expense to have my own antenna mounted where my DirecTV dish is now will nicely eliminate the $70 monthly charge and I won't miss anything important.

So, the stubbornness of Time Warner Cable, the Dodgers organization, and (yes) DirecTV costs them all this viewer/fan/subscriber. I hope they're happy, because even if SportsNetLA is available next season, I won't be back.
 
I've always thought that this problem was compounded from the beginning when TWC signed this deal with the Dodgers, and TWC not insisting that the Dodgers share the already-existing Time Warner Cable SportsNet with the Lakers. Maybe perhaps TWC did so, and the Dodgers didn't want to budge, but Dodgers games would have made the perfect spring/summer-time complement to the Lakers, instead of Lakers off-season filler programming or Sparks and Galaxy games (no offense to Sparks or Galaxy fans). Any programming conflicts would have been solved by either creating a game-time overflow channel (like other RSNs do elsewhere) or farming-out games to a local over-the-air station (most likely KDOC, since they and TWC Sports have history together).

I'm currently a TWC subscriber, after years with DirecTV, and with higher cost of programming, equipment fees, and taxes (especially with my family and I only watching about 30-40 channels on a regular basis), I'm starting to regret my decision. I'm not sure if I want to continue on keeping a traditional cable TV package going forward when there's a lot of other alternatives out there (including Sling TV, or VOD services like Netflix, Crackle, and Hulu). Certainly, if I wasn't a sports fan, I would ditched cable/satellite quite a time ago, and been fine with just over-the-air TV plus the aforementioned VOD services; part of the another reason I still have cable is the not-so-great TV reception in my neighborhood, and we live in an apartment building. I can't get KABC at all with an indoor antenna, and KCAL, KTTV and KCOP have spotty reception at best. KCBS, KNBC, and KTLA are the most reliable stations to receive, plus a couple of the Spanish stations.

Not that it would happen anytime soon, but if ESPN and/or Fox Sports offers a standalone subscription (similar to HBO Now), that would definitely make me ditch cable, just so long as the price is affordable enough.
 
Last edited:
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom