If you read this blog or know me personally, you know that I don’t talk about sports much. Well, professional sports anyway. I do talk about running, snowboarding, and occasionally mountain biking. The reason I don’t talk about professional sports is because I rarely care about them. I used be a huge football, hockey, and baseball fan when I was a kid, but that kind of went away around age 16. Since then, I haven’t cared too much. I don’t really follow anything, but if and when it does come up, I’m still a Philly fan. That will probably never change.
All that being said, every now and again, I get sucked in around the end of the season. I did for the Eagles a few years ago and now I am for the Phillies this year. Yeah yeah, I know, I’m just following for the playoffs and not the regular season or through the bad times. Whatever, call me a fair-weather fan if you want, but I’m not getting sucked in just because they’re doing well. The Phillies have been great for a few years now, but this is the first that I got sucked in with them in a much longer period of time. I don’t know what does it, but every now and again, it just happens.
Now, what I want to bitch about is Cablevision and Fox/News Corp. News Corp wants more money from Cablevision and Cablevision doesn’t want to pay it. So what happens? They pull Fox from Cablevision. Awesome. They also pull their Hulu channels for Cablevision customers. Thanks, dudes.
What does this have to do with baseball and the Phillies? Well, Fox is the channel broadcasting the games. So, I can’t watch them. I watched game one of the NLCS at my fiancée’s parents’ house since we were there anyway and, last night, I had to follow mlb.com’s play-by-play online. Their play-by-play Flash application on their site is pretty decent, but you’re not actually watching the game which sucks. I tried listening online to the radio coverage from Philly, but they didn’t broadcast the game on their stream. And mlb.com charges to watch/listen online. Awesome.
Figures, one of the rare times that I actually care about sports and I can’t even watch. It’s not even that big of a deal, I’ll survive. What is ridiculous though is that News Corp and Cablevision have no problem screwing their customers. We are the ones that pay Cablevision directly, without us, they don’t make any money. Letting this happen is a slap in the face. News Corp makes most of their money from advertising, but without people watching, no one is going to pay to advertise. Now, Cablevision’s 3 million or whatever subscribers barely makes a dent for Fox so they’re advertising revenues will be 100% unaffected, but that’s not the point, it’s another slap in our faces.
While Fox and Cablevision are duking it out, it’s the rest of us that get screwed. In the end, they’ll reach some agreement and that’ll be that, they’ll both be fine, but those of us that just want to watch the TV we’re paying for are the ones losing out and there isn’t really anything we can do about it. It’s just greed.
So thanks, guys. You both suck and you’re both at fault. Quit blaming each other and quit screwing the innocent customers.
I just want to watch some baseball for the next two weeks while I still actually care about it.
