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Originally Posted by tk13
The even bigger issue is rights fees. The politics don't make a lick of difference, and the loss of the cord cutters definitely hurts... but ESPN charges a ton of money to cable companies.
A big problem is they are paying billions for the rights to broadcast these sports. $2 billion for the NFL, over a billion for the NBA. Nearly a billion for baseball. And that doesn't include half a billion for the College Football Playoff and hundreds of millions with all these individual conferences they broadcast in both football and basketball. They've been shedding talent for a while now. I'm really interested to see what they do when some of these TV contracts expire. Will they stop broadcasting quite as many sports as they do now?
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I think everyone knows that the rights fees was a bubble that was eventually going to burst. IMO, it was a desperate move by companies to keep people on cable/satellite roles, b/c if you maintain your subscriber base you can pump up your profits in the short-term.
None of these properties are worth what ESPN, Viacom, etc. paid for them.
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"When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”--Abraham Lincoln
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