Off Wing Opinion

Gregg Easterbrook isn't happy with the choices network television is giving him when it comes to Sunday football viewing:

And, as Tuesday Morning Quarterback may possibly have mentioned, the solution to the problem of local affiliates airing woofer games -- NFL Sunday Ticket, which allows viewers to pay $209 per season to watch any contest -- continues to be available strictly on a monopoly basis to subscribers of DirecTV, the satellite service. Only about 10 percent of American households subscribe to DirecTV; many millions of American households cannot receive the DirecTV signal for technical reasons, regardless of willingness to pay. (TMQ keeps a running count: Of those people I personally know who have tried to subscribe to DirecTV, three have been able to get the signal and eight found it impossible to sign up, including yours truly.) Bad pairings air on free TV; the best games are often shown only via a monopoly service that 90 percent of Americans can't or don't get.

The Sunday Ticket part seems like total lunacy until you take into account that DirecTV is in the process of being sold to Rupert Murdoch, who thrives on establishing media cartels. Murdoch is paying the league about $400 million a year to maintain this particular monopoly. So the NFL gets many dineros, and Murdoch adds a monopoly to his portfolio. But with all the talk of Congress being opposed to media consolidation, TMQ continues to wonder why Congress doesn't investigate the DirecTV monopoly over Sunday Ticket. The primary effect of the NFL's deal with the DirecTV devil is, after all, to shaft American taxpayers whose tax monies make NFL stadiums and profits possible.

Easterbrook has been over this point a bunch of times, so much so it's getting annoying.

First, DirectTV, while Easterbrook describes its relationship with the NFL as a monopoly, is actually the only competitor to America's massive cable companies -- essentially a nationwide patchwork of local monopolies. For the vast majority of Americans before the advent of DirectTV and other satellite providers, if you wanted ESPN, HBO, Showtime, etc., you had to go to your local cable company. And, because most municipalities only authorized one cable system to come into their towns, they had no choice but to go to their local monopoly provider. Being monopoly service providers, cable companies had essentially no incentive to upgrade their services, pay any attention to customer service, or keep control of prices.

That was, of course, until DirectTV came on the scene. Then, all of a sudden, cable companies had to worry about hanging on to customers who had, GASP, choices in how they obtained pay television programming (how could you miss the cable commercials about how horrible satellite TV is). And one of the most important aspects of competition, is being able to differentiate your product from your competitors. And the most important way DirectTV does this (besides by providing better customer service than local cable companies), is by being the exclusive provider of NFL Sunday Ticket.

As for Easterbrook's non-scientific sample on DirectTV, I have a research project of my own. Out of all the people I know who don't have DirectTV and access to NFL Sunday Ticket (a few hundred folks at last count), every single one of them lives within walking or driving distance of a restaurant or sports bar that can receive the service.

At bottom, Easterbrook's complaint essentially boils down to him asking for government intervention in the marketplace so he doesn't have to rub elbows with local fans at a neighborhood bar. Somehow, I think that might be setting the bar too low. Even worse, the government would be intervening on behalf of an industry that in the recent past Congress felt the need to subject to more exacting regulatory standards.

Now, would I like to have NFL Sunday Ticket available on my local cable system? Of course I would. I just don't think I have a right to request government intervention on behalf of my personal entertainment choices.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2003 at 10:33 am by Eric McErlain and is filed under Business, Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.