Why Can't We Watch the U.S. Open?
An ongoing feud between Disney and Spectrum has gotten in the way of tennis fans' viewing plans.
Dear readers,
Happy Sunday. Before we get into our main item this week, a quick programming note: Next week will be our 150th edition of Southpaw, which is a milestone we’re quite proud of. With a few exceptions, we’ve published a newsletter every week for the past three years — even as the two of us moved cities, started our careers, changed jobs, and tried to maintain reasonably robust social lives. We’re grateful to all of you, our readers, for sticking with us.
Now that both of us have full-time jobs in media, though, we think it makes sense to do a little bit of experimentation with the newsletter. Rather than firing off a quick take every week, we’re hoping to take a little more time to dive deep into the stories that interest us. This means that we might be responding less to the sports/politics news of the day, and focusing instead on the topics that aren’t getting the attention they deserve. It also means that, going forward, we’re going to try to deliver a meatier issue less frequently rather than publishing a quick story every week. Some months we may publish every other week, other months it might be more or less, but we can promise that Southpaw will remain a regular fixture in your inboxes. We’ll still publish on Sunday mornings. Our hope is that this will make the product better and will keep all of you engaged every time you open one of our emails. As always, we appreciate your support.
Now on to our main item: Why streaming sucks.
-Calder and Ian
The U.S. Open wraps up tonight with the men’s singles final at Flushing Meadows, and as always, this year’s tournament has been a wild ride. On the women’s side, Coco Gauff, the 19-year-old rising star from Atlanta, won her first Grand Slam title in a thrilling match with Aryna Sabalenka. On the men’s side, we’ve got another showdown this afternoon between superstars Novak Djokovic and Daniil Medvedev.
There has only been one hitch: For about 15 million fans around the country, the tournament might as well have happened on the moon.
That’s right: If you (like us) happen to be among the 15 million Americans who subscribe to Spectrum TV, chances are pretty good that you weren’t able to watch the vast majority of the tournament. That’s because Spectrum’s parent company, Charter Communications, is caught up in a protracted fight with ESPN — which has the exclusive streaming rights to the tournament — and its parent company, Disney.
The details of the showdown are mostly beside the point, but here’s the big picture: During contract negotiations with Charter, Disney asked the provider to pay higher fees to carry its content — even though Charter, like every cable provider, is hemorrhaging subscribers to streaming services (like ESPN+). Charter agreed to the higher fees but asked Disney to throw in some extra perks for its subscribers. Disney balked at that request and pulled all of its content from the Charter Spectrum system — including the U.S. Open, streaming on ESPN.
Spectrum’s subscribers, in turn, were left with only one option: Shell out some more cash for yet another online cable streaming service like YouTube TV — while still paying the full (and outrageously high price) of Spectrum. Fans were understandably angry about this, and some fans in Florida were pissed enough that they decided to file a class-action lawsuit against Charter for failure to deliver services.
This is, obviously, bad news for tennis fans, but there’s a bigger story here about the future of the sports entertainment business as a whole. As we’ve seen from the ongoing strikes in Hollywood, the streaming model has broken the movie and television industries. But now, it’s coming for one of the few remaining reasons to have a cable subscription: live sports.
Since the early 1980s, ESPN has built its business model atop people like plaintiffs in Florida: fans who are so hooked on ESPN’s content that they’re willing to do just about anything to maintain their access to it. This worked out well for ESPN, since it was able to force cable companies to pay exorbitant fees to carry their channels. At the same time, they made lots and lots of money from advertising contracts. These two revenue streams helped ESPN grow even more, fueling a vicious (or, from their point of view, virtuous) cycle of expansion and consolidation.
But in the past five years, as more and more people have cut the cable in favor of streaming services, cable companies like Spectrum have decided that it doesn’t make economic sense to give ESPN everything they want. In effect, ESPN is saying to Charter: As your customers leave, you need us more than ever, so pay up. In response, Charter is saying: Our customers are leaving even with your content — and now you want us to pay more? A reasonable person could understand both sides of this standoff, but this whole debate is made more ridiculous by streaming services’ new galaxy-brained plan: What if we had a bunch of live TV that viewers could watch, in addition to a library of on-demand content?
Sound familiar?
Basically, the streamers are recreating cable. Currently, Spectrum TV “select signature” — the company’s most popular plan, with over 150 channels — costs $59.99/month in the New York City area. Compare that to Hulu’s cheapest plan, advertised as “Hulu (With Ads) + Live TV, Disney+ (With Ads) and ESPN+ (With Ads).” That costs $69.99/month now and is going up to $76.99/month in early October. That plan has 85 channels.
You can see where this is all heading. Cord cutting is attractive because most people are already paying for all the streaming services they need. If you’re only using cable for sports, there are easier ways to get ESPN that don’t require you to pay the full $60/month for cable. But now, streaming services are starting to bundle. And as they do that, we’re going to start having to pay more to recreate the experience that we used to have with cable, albeit with a slightly larger number of offerings on demand and many fewer live channels.
The promise of Netflix and other streaming services was that they’d give us easier access to a wider range of programming. But now, between rising streaming prices and more feuds like the one between Spectrum and Disney, we’re barreling towards less for more.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
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