Sports watching on TV is getting expensive.
There is nothing in the United States Constitution nor is there anything in the almost 250-year-old American Declaration of Independence that guarantees an American citizen the right to watch a professional or college sports event for nothing on television. The Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr wants to take action against Major League Baseball and the National Football League for expanding their video presentations well beyond over-the-air commercial TV and pay cable TV to streaming services such as Apple, Amazon Prime, Peacock, Netflix and the Google owned YouTube. Right now, the NFL is talking with Google about a five game YouTube package. It is almost laughable that Carr is going after the NFL and MLB considering that consumers have had to buy cable TV packages to watch games for decades. Carr is warning the NFL that it could lose its limited antitrust exemption if it moves too many games behind streaming service paywalls.
That antitrust exemption comes in the form of the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act legislation which allowed the NFL to take its 14 franchises and package it as one entity and sell its games to a TV network. The Supreme Court of the United States in 1922 ruled that the National and the American Leagues of baseball were not really a business but a game and granted the two leagues an antitrust exemption and allowed the game to act as a monopoly. It is getting expensive to watch sports with the unknown monthly cable TV fee for ESPN and what is left of the regional cable TV networks along with the streaming services. The NFL-Amazon Prime package costs $15 a month, Netflix charges $9 a month, NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube costs about $500. People do have a choice to buy or not to buy a service.
Evan Weiner’s books are available at iTunes – https://books.apple.com/us/author/evan-weiner/id595575191
Evan can be reached at evan_weiner@hotmail.com
