Without sports, what games are TV providers playing during pandemic?

View of Studio 31 at SNY's studios on March 3, 2017. Credit: Corey Sipkin
Sports is the most expensive programming on your television bill, and at present there are no sports. So where does that leave consumers as they navigate life during the COVID-19 pandemic?
For the moment, mostly in limbo. But a reckoning will be at hand eventually, depending in part on how long the disruption in live action continues and whether seasons are canceled or merely postponed.
It is an extraordinarily complex subject, part of a tangle of contract language and clauses at every stage of the sports television food chain.
That chain begins with consumers, who pay distributors for their service, who pay sports channels for the right to carry them, who pay leagues and teams for their games, who pay players and other personnel.
In short, Long Island’s cable television bills pay a significant part of Gerrit Cole and Jacob deGrom’s salary.
The question is how long the chain can remain intact when its underpinning, live games, disappears.
“I think a lot of this has to do with whether or not stuff is canceled or just delayed, and I just don’t think we know that yet,” said Rich Greenfield of LightShed partners, a technology, media and telecommunications research firm based in New York.
“Obviously, the NCAA Tournament has been called, but most things to date have just been delayed . . . I think that is what makes this really challenging.”
Consumers always are welcome to call their distributor, such as Altice, Verizon or DirecTV, and protest paying for expensive channels such as ESPN nationally or YES, SNY and MSG locally when there are no games.
It was a common complaint even before the games stopped. Many distributors have tired of being blamed for high sports costs and now break out a “regional sports network fee” on their bills. That fee varies by provider, but it is less than the actual combined cost of such networks to distributors.
The challenge for the industry is that many non-sports fans already had caught onto this reality in recent years and abandoned the traditional cable television bundle in favor of so-called “cord cutting,” going it alone using streaming services, social media, over-the-air channels and the like.
If casual or even avid sports fans do the same, the entire sports television ecosystem could collapse.
“What we’ve called it is that sports is the last Jenga piece holding up the cable bundle,” Greenfield said. “But again, sports isn’t gone. It’s just a matter of when it’s coming back.”
Cable, satellite and telecom distributors -- c have contracts with channels such as YES, SNY and MSG that require a certain number of games, although typically there is flexibility in how long they have to deliver those games in the case of, say, a work stoppage.
(Live games dwarf other programming on those channels in value, so never mind studio shows or the playing of classic games to fill the time.)
If they are not delivered, they could save on those costs, which in turn they could pass on to consumers. Every part of the chain affects every other.
The wild card is that sports leagues and teams have such close, symbiotic relationships with TV entities – in some cases including part ownership – that it is in everyone’s best interests to work together and figure things out.
The streaming service DAZN, which in the United States mostly carries boxing and mixed martial arts, has begun withholding rights fees. But other outlets have held off for now.
As for distributors, “We are reviewing our contractual relationships with the various networks we carry as we continue to monitor the situation,” an Altice spokeswoman said.
Erin McPherson, head of consumer content and partnerships at Verizon, recently told The New York Times, “We don’t want to charge our customers for content they aren’t watching and receiving. Whether that is going to be in the form of a refund or discontinued billing, we are looking at all of those options right now.”
But, she added, “We need the broadcasters and RSNs, and the leagues, to cooperate with that approach.”
That dynamic still is unfolding. Like everything else about the fallout from the virus, where it goes is unknowable.
Greenfield said New York-area consumers are in a particularly challenging position, given the costs associated with having three RSNs as well as national outlets clogging their bills.
But when this is over, the march of the cable un-bundlers might pick up pace.
“Right now, my guess is that cord-cutting is very low because you’re stuck at home and no one wants an installer coming to their house,” Greenfield said.
“On the other end of this in 2021 I think you’ll see record levels of cord cutting because of the sheer fact of being in a recession and the sheer fact that people have learned how compelling all of these streaming services are, not to mention there are a host of new streaming services launching.”
Sports streaming services, such as ESPN+, also are beginning to mature, so cord-cutters need not do without sports entirely.
Then again, at some point even the non-sports programming people currently are enjoying will dry up.
“We’ve never seen so many parts of the entertainment business effectively shut down,” Greenfield said. “Heck, in another month there will be almost nothing new on television.
“Unless it was shot earlier, it’s not coming out. There’s going to be very, very little left.”