Quote:
Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
I always thought TV revenue for professional sports was ad driven in a large part though, which relies on ratings, which relies on having a large and growing number of viewers.
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For a long time, TV revenue for professional sports was driven by regional sports networks. The managers of the RSNs perceived a need to have local major-league sports teams on their channels to drive demand to the point where cable companies would impose a fee on
all subscribers to carry those channels. If your RSN is on basic cable, you're paying several bucks a month for it whether you ever watch it or not.
With the sheer volume of cable-cutters out there, this is no longer a viable business model. In a case like Rogers, where the same corporation owns both the RSN and the cable company, they lose business at both ends. If people won't subscribe to cable, they try to ding them hard for subscriptions to streaming services in order to make that alternative as unattractive as possible. Rogers doesn't
want people subscribing to SN+. It wants people paying $150 a month for full cable.
I've seen this story play out repeatedly in other industries. If you try to make new products expensive and unattractive to preserve your market in the old products, you just end up losing the customer altogether.