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Jeremy Loome ,

March 2, 2014 Email

Jeremy Loome



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Okay, hands up if you’re under 30 and don’t bother subscribing to cable TV anymore. That wooshing sound was a generation making a point, MLS. As the season nears, Major League Soccer is once again offering its flagship game service MLSlive to watchers of the beautiful game. And once again, we can expect a season of local blackouts that drive subscribers crazy. It’s one of the few things about self-promotion that MLS is really out of bounds on these days. It’s not just that the blackouts ignore the fact that MLS’ largest demographic generally doesn’t spend much on cable anymore; it’s the fact that so many of them pander to regional cable channels that cost a considerable amount on top regular packaging. Even in cases where the additional cost isn’t much – adding TSN and TSN2 to my digital package only means a $10 tier per month, and many services offer them for free – it ignores the reality that a) blackouts are designed to get butts in stadium seats; but the basic poverty many of us go through when young and starting careers is the largest reason young fans 18-30 don’t go to games, not television availability and b) when it’s not a national network broadcast but a regional channel blackout, MLS is trying to force its young fans to subscribe to two different products, making it even harder for them to buy a ticket: MLS live if they want to see the rest of the league, and a local channel as well. In fact, MLS has gotten better about this; most of the games blacked out last year were only because they were nationally broadcast, which is financially understandable. The major networks are paying through the nose for sports – the new MLS deal with Fox to start in 2015 is rumored to be $70 million a year, well past the $27 million per season paid by NBC over the last few years. While the networks make plenty of money off ads, they also have carrier deals with local cable channels where appeasement is sometimes necessary. Eventually that will change, but for now cable still has enough power to make it a fiscal reality. But there were a few markets, Toronto included, where that wasn’t the case. TSN2 games were blacked out several times, and there are many cable tiers in Canada where TSN2 is a paid specialty channel. Even TSN itself isn’t available on every system; for example, Telus is a pretty big carrier, but its digital package offers everything in categorical tiers – so unless you subscribe to ten sports channels at once, you don’t get any. Of course, the Canadian television market is particularly heinous about all of this thanks to government protectionism of both cable companies and internet carriers; we’re charged way more for both than people in other developed nations, with companies allowed far more leeway to make it difficult to do anything but spend and spend if you want full coverage. Inevitably, however, this greed ignores the fact that people who feel cheated will cheat right back, as a form of self-protection. It is very easy to stream illegal version of any football game in the world right now, from a number of different off-short server host sites like wiziwig.tv and atdhe.net, sites that are probably breaking all sorts of rules but, nonetheless, will take those risks to make a buck on advertising and spamware delivery (in some but not all cases, certainly) because there’s a market there created by decision like that of MLS. Instead, it would be nice to see MLS go radically the other way. Lower the price of MLS live to whatever the current carrier profit kickback is, and remove any overhead profit motivation by the league itself, turning it into a revenue neutral league promotional vehicle, with no local blackouts except on nationally televised games. The original TV carrier will still get his cut and the league will develop a new generation of fans from the online availability. That’s a win-win from almost any perspective. Veteran print journalist Jeremy Loome is the co-publisher of Gigcity.ca and author of the “Quinn” mysteries under the penname LH Thomson.