From the
New York Times:
Major League Baseball is close to announcing a deal that will place its Extra Innings package of out-of-market games exclusively on DirecTV, which will also become the only carrier of a long-planned 24-hour baseball channel.
Extra Innings has been available to 75 million cable households and the two satellite services, DirecTV and the Dish Network. But the new agreement will take it off cable and Dish because DirecTV has agreed to pay $700 million over seven years, according to three executives briefed on the details of the contract but not authorized to speak about them publicly.
It may as well have read, "Major League Baseball is close to extending a gigantic middle finger to those who live in most rental properties and/or urban settings that don't face the southern sky."
I bought Extra Innings last year on Time Warner Cable, and would have been a faithful consumer of it for years to come, even with moderate price hikes. But DirecTV is not an option for me, and it won't be for the forseeable future since I live in an apartment building. I don't even have a porch off which to jerry-rig a dish.
So it looks like I'm screwed, all because of what seems to be a very marginal amount of money ($100 million annually spread amongst 30 teams, so teams could overpay one more middle reliever!). For contextual purposes, DirecTV pays the NFL $700 million
annually for their services. That would be a considerable amount.
If this goes through, then people like me are stuck with three options:
1) Boycott. I wish I could. Of course, this site would decrease in value accordingly, unless more people wanted to hear my thoughts on bad sandwich combinations or drivers who can't merge than the White Sox.
2) Buy Gameday Audio only. During the 2005 season, I paid $15 for the season and listened to John Rooney and Ed Farmer all year, and picking up what games I could on ESPN or WGN. It's how I followed the Sox during their championship season since I was bound to move, and it wasn't terrible. The problem is that I don't get WGN in New York.
3) Buy MLB.TV. In theory, this would be nice. However, considering I spend seven of my eight hours at work on a computer, and an hour or so on this site every night, the idea of having to spend an additional three hours staring at a computer screen is scary.
I'd pretty much be shoehorned into No. 3 and hope an S-video cable makes up the difference -- but that doesn't necessarily make sense for MLB, since it cost half the price of an Extra Innings subscription last year. This is all to say I'd expect MLB to raise the price of MLB.TV and kick me in the ass once more for good measure.
Most businesses go to extra measures to take care of devoted customers, but Major League Baseball would rather bend them over. Thanks, baseball.