The Los Angeles Dodgers have won two straight NL West titles and will be in the running for a third this season. They play in the nation’s second-largest media market. They’re one of Major League Baseball’s marquee franchises, with the legendary Vin Scully calling home games and road contests that take place elsewhere on the West Coast.
And yet for a second straight season, a majority of their fans in Southern California will not be able to watch most of their games on television because of a fundamentally stupid argument over subscriber fees.
The dispute stems from a 2013 deal between the Dodgers and Time Warner Cable, which paid the team a reported $8.35 billion to become the distributor of its SportsNet LA cable network. In turn, Time Warner Cable asked the other cable and satellite suppliers in the region to charge their customers $4 a month for the privilege of showing Dodgers.
According to Bloomberg, DirecTV, Charter, Dish, Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc.’s U-verse and Cox Communications all said no, meaning the only Southern Californians who could watch most Dodgers games last season were those who subscribed to either Time Warner Cable or Bright House Networks.
The Los Angeles Times estimates that only 30 percent of the team’s fan base subscribes to either of those two companies.
The dispute shows no sign of ending this season, with the Times reporting that “that there are currently no negotiations between Time Warner Cable and the region’s other cable and satellite providers, and none are scheduled.” The two sides sides reportedly are waiting on the Federal Communications Commission to rule on the proposed mergers between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, and the one between AT&T and DirecTV.
The Times’ Bill Plaschke casts a pox on all their houses:
The Dodgers still look greedy for doing a Time Warner Cable deal — worth $8.35 billion over 25 years — that priced their games far beyond what most pay-TV operators will accept.
Time Warner Cable still looks bumbling for believing it could sell that package to DirecTV, and failing miserably in the attempt, which has influenced other pay-TV operators to steer clear.
DirecTV still looks stubborn for refusing to agree to an independent arbitration that would force both sides to accept a fair price.
Everyone is arrogant, everyone is wrong, and everyone is now blaming the whole mess on a couple of slow-moving marriages that were supposed to clean it up, but have only made it worse.
A minor compromise was reached at the end of last season, when the Dodgers pressed Time Warner Cable to allow the team’s final six regular season games to be broadcast on local channel KDOC. Viewership tripled from laughably small numbers for such a major-market team — about 55,000 per game. Plaschke says this seemingly easy fix should be repeated this season until the impasse is solved. But there has been no official push to do that from the team or Time Warner Cable.
“Like it or not, the Dodgers are more than just a business, they are a public trust, they are essentially owned by the people of Los Angeles,” Brian Gadinsky, a TV producer and longtime Dodgers season ticket holder, told the Times. “That they can treat fans like this is just terrible. But just they don’t care.”
After spending the first 17 years of his Post career writing and editing, Matt and the printed paper had an amicable divorce in 2014. He's now blogging and editing for the Early Lead and the Post's other Web-based products.
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