The Dodgers put broadcast legend Vin Scully out to pasture. No, Vin is still doing Dodger games, but most of his fans cannot listen to him.
When the new Dodger ownership partnered up with Time Warner Cable to launch the new Dodger channel, the team got more than $8 billion in licensing fees. Meanwhile, the channel got stuck in neutral. The new channel wanted to extract $4 or more per subscriber per month from every cable and sat-tv operator in Southern California. That is premium ESPN carriage charges.
DirectTV and other cable systems balked at the fee structure. So, the Dodgers have basically blacked themselves out of their own local market. Only 3 in 10 Dodger fans can get Dodger games this season. It is quite the broadcast boondoggle.
But someone should have seen it coming.
Cable bills have skyrocketed in the last decade, mostly due to the increased costs in carrying sports and specialty channels. As a result of higher bills and a soft economy, more and more subscribers have cut the cable cord and dropped service. Many youngsters are now using their mobile devices as their entertainment platform of choice, so the cable industry is losing a key, long term demographic.
Just because a team has a product it thinks is a valuable commodity, you may not be able to sell it or distribute it.
So when the Cubs are counting on their new cable channel in 2020, and the expected revenue windfall, that can only be described as mere speculation. There may not be cable as we know it in 2020. It may be an a la carte subscription service which means expensive sports channel fees will evaporate. The market may have moved on to total mobility. Or baseball itself may be on the viewership decline. Or television advertising, the driving force behind big money deals, may also have bitten the bust.
The Dodgers have reached a stalemate with the cable companies. Neither side wants to give an inch. So, a majority of fans who thought getting rid of Frank McCourt as owner would have been a godsend for the franchise are getting bitten. The new owners did spend money like the Yankees, but now don't have the long term cable partnerships to sustain it. And the fans who want to watch the expensive superstars in the home white and blue, are left out in the cold. Bitter and angry. And missing Vin.
