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A comment on Blackout Forces Fred Wilson to Pirate The Knicks. What Would Congress Think?. Parent comment

Re:Blackout Forces Fred Wilson to Pirate The Knicks. What Wo... by marknutter on Tuesday January 03, 2012 @12:34PM (#3420433)
The NBA is basically promising these networks they will bring them eyeballs. By offering league pass to all customers without restrictions, and passing on all ad revenue to the network which holds the right to that specific game, they increasing their ability to deliver on the promise. For instance, if a game is televised on TNT, but X number of potential viewers don't have cable TV but do have internet access, by allowing them to watch the game online they are bringing even more users to TNT (passing all or most of the ad revenue less hosting expenses to TNT).

Seems like a fairly straightforward solution to me. My assumption is that the powers that be aren't technologically sophisticated enough to understand the benefits of it.

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Re:Blackout Forces Fred Wilson to Pirate The Knicks. What Wo... by mikeryan on Tuesday January 03, 2012 @01:10PM (#3420610)
Seems like a fairly straightforward solution to me. My assumption is that the powers that be aren't technologically sophisticated enough to understand the benefits of it.

This isn't the case, most networks are extremely technically sophisticated (ESPN especially) the misunderstanding here is business related. TNT and ESPN make millions (in ESPN's case billions) a year in subscriber fees from cable operators. ESPN alone makes $3-5 from each cable subscriber in the US (there's about 120M of them) each month. A significant portion of these network's revenues are made on subscriber fees. The solution you propose jeopardizes these agreements for what would currently be a paltry amount of streaming ad revenues.

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Re:Blackout Forces Fred Wilson to Pirate The Knicks. What Wo... by xsmasher on Tuesday January 03, 2012 @01:28PM (#3420681)
The NBA is promising these networks a product that they can attach advertising to and re-sell. The league pass devalues game in the eyes of TNT - they can't resell the content to local cable providers to attach advertising to.

If they want to cut out two middlemen (the network and the local cable provider) then the NBA must learn to create a steady audience and get money from advertisers, which is a different skill than putting on ball games.

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