Thanks to ESPN and YouTubeTV, sports fans are once again hostages willing to pay the ransom

The following is a refreshed version of a 2020 article, which, sadly but predictably, is still relevant today as ESPN and other Disney channels are now off the increasingly popular YouTube TV ahead of a busy fall weekend.

Over the last two years, I’ve paid for some of these random TV-related items below, as have many of our readers.

For the past two football seasons, I’ve added month-to-month subscriptions to Sling, Fubo, and YouTube TV to feed my football addiction. The free trials help me feel a bit better about doing it, but then they start to renew, and I feel guilty for being such an addict.

My addiction to my favorite sport is shared with my girlfriend (now wife!) and me, as we watch about 25 hours a week. Daily fantasy, regular fantasy, betting, and our favorite teams, it’s pretty extensive, and to the point, it’s not a question of if I’ll pay to unlock additional football, but when, and what service.

How did it come to this?

For almost my entire adult life, I had DirecTV. Despite some bumps in the road—no Pac-12 Network and a short window when NBC Sports Network wasn’t carried —I never felt the need to get my wallet out and find a way to circumvent my cable/sat provider to get a channel or a game.

But in 2018, I moved into a condo building that required me to switch to U-verse, AT&T’s unloved stepchild (now owned by TPG). For a while, things were fine. It even had Pac-12 Network and the Longhorn Network, so I was actually ahead in some ways. I said goodbye to paying for the Sunday Ticket as $400 is bullshit when I mostly just watched Redzone, which I was now getting a decent but inferior version for basically free. But then it started.

First, the Pac-12 Network went away, which would have been fine. However, I suckered a poor old Stanford football fan into cohabitating with me, not long after the rug got pulled out from me even further with both the NFL Network and NFL RedZone going away as part of an ongoing pissing match between AT&T and the NFL, mostly about disagreements with DirecTV’s Sunday Ticket deal.

Gone were Thursday Night Football games (NFL Network games have now mainly moved to Sunday mornings and some Saturdays), and Sundays full of Red Zone, which is much needed for a transplant in Ohio, and being subjected to large doses of Browns and Bengals games was just not acceptable. I badly needed a fix, and I gave in.

The streaming services know people like me are coming too. They stash the channels you need across different packages, so you have to buy the biggest package possible. Prices keep moving up, too. The $30 entry-level packages are long gone. If you want the fix you need, it’s going to cost $70 because you’ve been upsold to the most expensive package. If you’re smart, you’ll call your cable/satellite company to complain about your missing channels. Doing so under the guise that you’re cancelling will usually save you $500-$1000 a year. That’s more than enough to pay for a few months of whatever streaming package you’ve paid for, but it’s still a hassle to claw back money from one cable company to give to another.

As our poll showed, it’s not just extra streaming packages. Digital antennas are a good way to get back-dropped network affiliates and league streaming packages from MLB, the NBA, and the NHL. They are an easy way to bypass RSN blackouts or to avoid cable altogether, though blackout policies often make that a treacherous road.

I thought that in time, U-verse would work it out and I’d be free from double-dipping. Nobody really wins these pissing matches with the NFL. Unfortunately, it’s only gotten worse. NBC went away for a few months earlier this year. I’m now entering weekend number two without my local CBS. And it’s not just football, as both these channels were my preferred local news outlets and also had national programming like ’60 Minutes,’ so this affects far more people than just sports fans clamoring to watch a game.

This site used to write about a prominent carriage dispute once every few months. They were usually resolved quickly, before major sporting events. Neither the channels nor the distributors seemed to want to ruffle customers. We’ve now entered a new normal where channels come and go, with no service being a safe harbor from dropping a channel without warning, which means the game you are counting down the days to watch.  In years past, you thought cable companies wouldn’t want to be without big games like the SEC Championship or multiple weekends of NFL games with in-state teams. The new normal will continue to get worse (it sure has!).

https://twitter.com/OhioStAthletics/status/1178293350044176384

50% of the respondents in our poll don’t pay the ransom. I envy them. In a pre-pandemic world, you could go to a bar or a friend’s house. You could also find an illegal stream if you were technologically savvy and morally flexible enough.

But nearly half of you are with me. Giving in because we indulge our addiction to the sports, teams, and games we can’t live without. In the last year, I’ve signed up for Flo Sports, Big Ten Network+, ESPN+, and MLB.TV for short periods to catch random things I’ve wanted to watch. More and more programming we are used to watching on standard cable or broadcast TV is migrating to these streaming services, with the knowledge that enough of us are addicted enough to take out our wallet, enter our credit card info, and hopefully let it renew month after month, long past the period you really “needed” it. (I am sad to say, I now am additionally or have subscribed to Peacock, ESPN+, Amazon, and Netflix to ensure I can watch the games I value).

We’re complicit customers in all of this, and it’s only going to get worse. If the never-ending carousel of carriage disputes has taught us anything, it’s that for many, sports fandom has no monetary limit. And neither does corporations’ willingness to piss off customers in search of profit margins. This is all by design. It’s the increasing friction of capitalism as cable bundles shrink while sports leagues seek more money to televise their games.

Regardless of whether we pay the ransom, we’re all hostages in this new normal.