[VLM]

The other death of sports issue was very carefully not mentioned in the article... look at the median age of baseball fans over the past decades. Its literally a dying sport, as in the fans are aging and dying and not being replaced. Obviously not an issue for some of the other sports. However being a sports nerd in the sitcom stereotype sense is definitely a boomer and pre-boomer generational thing, not so much with younger people, and old people have a way of dying off.

The biggest mistake the article made was conflating sport related spending with the housing bubble. The housing bubble blew because the last entrants into the ponzi were tapped out. The cost of sports is microscopic in comparison and very few people give up cable because they're completely and utterly tapped out. They just spend the $100 on something else. Probably a smartphone and some subscription services. Certainly the last entrant into the ponzi of paying a billion bucks for a team on the assumption you'll sell to a greater fool at two billion has not been reached, nor has the very last new sports fan been born yet.

The biggest oversight in articles of this type is no one wants to discuss bundling. The kind of business that forces all video subscribers to pay $30/mo for sports even if they're not sports fans, could, with just a couple clicks on a keyboard, change the bundle so all the cablemodem subscribers pay the same $30 extra for their cablemodem, but now it comes with free ESPN video or some kind of web access deal. There are, after all, only a handful of monopoly providers. So either pay $30 for ESPN, or disconnect yourself from the internet.

Trying to avoid paying for sports is like trying to avoid paying for organized crime. Or disorganized crime, for that matter. Unfortunately you can either pay up, or leave the geography and culture entirely. The government and corporations certainly are not going to help us because they are the organized crime in this analogy.

[bcoates]

ESPN already tried this when the writing was on the wall almost a decade ago. ESPN360/ESPN3/WatchESPN/whatever they call it now can only be watched if your ISP pays ESPN royalties for every subscriber on a take it or leave it basis. Time Warner called their bluff and only bundles it with your connection if you also buy basic cable.

You still "pay for ESPN" in the sense that TWC prices low-end internet-only packages to be uncompetitive with cable+internet bundles, but if you opt for the internet-only package TWC keeps the money. This works out great for TWC but not so much for ESPN or sports fans used to subsidy.