This is interesting.

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Relying on non-fans to pay carriage fees was doomed to fail eventually. They couldn't get away with that something-for-nothing deal forever.

I distinctly remember the first time I said "this is gonna go bad one day" was whenever Fox paid a huge long-term rights fee for the Texas Rangers. There's just no way people care that much about the Rangers.

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If it was going to be a problem in LA with the Dodgers it's foolish to think it's going to work anywhere. IIRC it was even a problem in NYC.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

YES had a rough start for the same reason Marquee did: the Yankees had just spurned MSG, then a division of Cablevision, which was the leading cable provider in Long Island and most of the outer boroughs. I think SNY had a rough start too for the same reason.

The Dodgers situation in LA never made sense to me. Time Warner started a channel for the Lakers and another for the Dodgers (or vice versa) and charged high carriage fees for both. They got too greedy, and most Angelenos couldn't watch Dodgers games for years (though if you do your research, the Dodgers have actually had a long tradition of being really bad at getting their games on TV; they've been a radio enterprise first and foremost).

Really makes you wonder what leaguewide revenues are going to look like if teams have to adapt to a la carte subscriptions instead of just collecting their little tolls from everyone who has cable. If that happens, the NHL is going to get it far worse than baseball.

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Especially when anything under major market get 40,000 or less viewers a game. It isn't worth all that production and advertisers get no bang for the buck. It's going to have to be that if some guy in Baltimore wants to watch his team in Oakland at 10 pm, he's going to have go through some MLB clearinghouse and pay to watch. Him and a few hundred other people.