If you are at all familiar with the physical sciences, you know that despite all the claptrap to the contrary, nothing ever really changes. Everything depends on the inexorable cycles of nature, the flapdoodle of postmodernism nothwithstanding.
So it is with sports on television. It was some 14 years ago when I last visited this subject, then as the TV writer for the late Sports inc. magazine. At that time, CBS had just paid an unbelievable $1.1 billion for four years of rights to Major League Baseball and $243 million for the rights to the 1992 Olympic Winter games in Albertville, and NBC had paid $409 million for the rights to the 1992 Olympic Summer Games in Barcelona. The National Football League was operating under a downwardly revised, $1.4 billion contract with three broadcast networks for three years and was looking at getting perhaps $1 billion per year by the end of the next decade. The NBA, propelled by a youthful and irreplaceable superstar named Jordan, was hot and getting hotter and looking for big increases in its next TV contract to boot.
Those numbers look relatively small these days. It was the promise of cable ? basic, pay and pay-per-view ? that gave these sports leagues hope in those postcrash, prerecession days of the late 1980s. And cable delivered. The leagues and their players are richer than ever. And there are now more and richer sports cable networks than ever.
Where did the money come from? Some of it, to be sure, was fronted by advertisers. The rest came from cable operators. But the promise of pay-per-view sports outside of boxing never materialized. And pay sports services disappeared with the creation of the Fox Sports Regional Networks. So operators, faced with increasing license fees from networks carrying sports, passed on the cost of sports programming to their basic subscribers. And cable bills went up. And Congress stepped in. And operators got reregulated.
Here's where the immutable laws of nature come in.
It looks like we're going to do it all over again.
The current spat between Cablevision Systems in New York and the new New York Yankees YES network is just one example of how cable can get back into the conundrum of rate hikes leading to more regulation, which leads to the need for more rate hikes. YES wants folks who couldn't care less about the Yankees or George Steinbrenner or the Jersey Nets or anything having to do with any of them to pay more for their cable service. The National Basketball Association has a similar gambit built into its most recent TV contract. Other owners and teams won't be far behind. Someone has to pay the bill. Be assured cable industry shareholders will not be stuck with the tab.
Now, don't get me wrong here. It's for Boss George to decide whether to pay insane salaries to mediocre ballplayers. It's his money. Or is it? He should give thanks that he's rich enough to be playing a game that is disguised as a business. No investor of sound mind would buy a sports team (with the notable exception of media companies, for which the team is a source of programming). Sports teams are toys for rich folks to play with. That they want to have fun and make money doing it is, well, fine, but not at all a moral imperative. Neither Steinbrenner nor any other sports owner is entitled to make money from people who have no interest in the product.
In New York, Cablevision is taking a stand. The merits of YES and Cablevision's reluctance to put YES on basic and pay it $2 a month per subcriber can be debated. But the fact that that would require the pass-through of increased costs for sports programming to all basic subscribers can not.
You may think that Washington is overrun with deregulatory zealots. Think again. Even Republicans react when cable subscribers call to complain about their escalating bills.
It would do the industry well to remember that there also is no debating the immutable law of nature: Nothing ever really changes. This is why, whenever you hear a cash register ring, someone like Reed Hundt is just around the corner.
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