Thursday, July 13, 2006

Update on television rights fiasco

According to an article in USA Today, the non-Fox LCS games are still up for grabs. TBS broadcasting all the Division Series is a done deal, but
With Fox showing just one LCS annually in the new deal — it will alternate between the leagues each year — one LCS is still up for grabs. ESPN and TBS are interested, and Fox Sports President Ed Goren says Fox would "be willing to split it in some fashion with another broadcaster."
Conceivably, these games could still be broadcast on network television. Heck, if you show it on ESPN and ABC at the same time, aren't you doubling your advertising revenue? Ha, ha. There is also a possibility MLB would do something about the cable-only division series:
First-round playoff games will only be on TBS. TBS is in about 90 million of the USA's more than 110 million TV homes. Tim Brosnan, MLB executive vice president, says the number of homes without cable TV "shrinks daily" but if MLB "heard enormous backlash" about games being unavailable on free TV, then "we'd go back and adjust."
But non-TV junkies like me are a dying breed, and that fact, coupled with our culture of apathy and "that's just the way it is" attitude, makes a backlash highly unlikely. Throw another shovel full of dirt on our national pastime.

Monopolies suck.

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