For Sports Networks, You Gotta Pay to Play

摘要

With baseball's Opening Day come the annual rites of spring: hot dogs, Cracker Jack, and rising cable bills. The insatiable demand for sports has long fed the pay-TV ecosystem, largely because the fees to show all those games are easily passed on to consumers. But this season, pay-TV outfits are struggling to figure out how they can absorb the surging cost of sports programming without alienating customers. Fees for televised sports are rising almost twice as fast as subscriber rates, squeezing profits at pay-TV companies such as DirecTV, Dish Network, and Time Warner Cable. The $2.3 billion price tag Magic Johnson's investor group will pay for the Los Angeles Dodgers sounds absurd until factoring in the billions Fox Sports or Time Warner Cable will likely pay for TV rights to broadcast the team's games.