Quote:
Originally Posted by octothorp
See, this is exactly the wrong sort of thinking: that viewers can be divided into two categories: casual fans who are happy to see whatever games get thrown their way through their cable packages; or hard-core fans who will pay $200 for a selection of out-of-market games.
Modern distribution models need to be about user-choice; every fan has different reasons for making their selections about what games they want to watch. Maybe it's the person who wants to watch in-market games on their computer because they don't have a TV available; the guy who wants to watch his home team while he's travelling; the guy who wants to watch a few out-of-market games that have significant implications for his home team; the fan who watches all the in-market games, but wants to re-watch one particularly fantastic game; the fan who's watching a game at home, is interrupted, doesn't have PVR, and wants to watch the end of the game. I could go on, there are literally dozens of scenarios for why fans would want a pay-per-usage, web-accessible distribution model.
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Exactly. As a student, I'm in Ontario half the time and Calgary, the other half. And at home, I don't own an HD tv so it makes sense for me to subscribe to game center (although it's hard to justify $200 purchase as a student). Although they black out the games in Calgary but I can work around that using a VPN. Given the cost and the inconvinience, a lot of other people will just watch an illegal stream.