The blue refers to the team colors of Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers. For the second year in a row most fans in the LA area are losing the ability to follow the team on local television and an organization called Consumer Watchdog is blaming Time Warner Cable.
CW said that TWC execs are saying they’re too busy working on the Comcast merger to deal with the situation.
“This isn’t blackmail, its ‘Blue Mail,'” said Consumer Watchdog’s founder, Harvey Rosenfield. “Comcast and Time Warner may think consumers and public officials will knuckle under in the hope that they’ll get access to TWC’s exclusive Dodgers channel, but it’s having the opposite effect. People realize that the merger will just give Comcast more monopoly power to dictate unfair prices and withhold programs people want.”
CW has been battling against the merger since it was first announced.
RBR+TVBR observation: It’s hard to figure who the winner is in this mess.
TWC clearly overpaid for the Dodgers, and other distributors in the market are stating just as clearly that they are not buying into the fees TWC wants. They are not going to foot TWC’s bill.
The Dodgers are getting more for their TV package than they should, so that’s good, but they are also losing access to their fan base and perhaps alienating some of them, which is not so good.
But don’t cry too hard for the Dodgers – for years to come, they will have a lot of money to count as they weigh the other pros and cons of the deal.
The TWC/Dodger deal raised the bar on sports franchising fees once again, providing another number for sports teams to try to top the next time a contract comes up, which hurts all program distributors and eventually the fans and MVPD subscribers who ultimately foot the bill.
On the plus side on that count, this deal has been such a fiasco that maybe the distributors will think twice before signing on the dotted line next time.
But we doubt it – as major league baseball fans in our own right, many time we have seen team owners vow to hold the line on free agent prices only to break the pledge at the first temptation. That may apply here are well.
The fans are certainly losers. They are either socked with higher prices or as in this case, denied access to the team’s games.
The biggest losers are people who wouldn’t watch a baseball game if you tied them to the TV – they will probably see their subscription rates jacked up regardless, making them subsidizers of the platform’s sports fans.
