Time Warner Cable's offer to cut the price of Dodgers-owned RSN SportsNet LA by 30% is "admirable," but the fact that the offer is "good for only one year is ridiculous," according to Bill Plaschke of the L.A. TIMES. The "supposedly serious offer actually shows the Dodgers are not very serious at all." Plaschke: "Would you expect DirecTV to make that deal? The currently misguided outrage toward them would be replaced by justified anger if they were to carry Dodgers games for an entire season and then drop the team because the price was once again too high." Plaschke writes, "Make the cut real. Make the discount permanent. Thirty percent for 100% of the life of a contract." The Dodgers "repeatedly have complained that DirecTV won't come to the bargaining table, but it's not DirecTV's responsibility to negotiate." Dodgers ownership has "done good things" since buying the team in '12, but because of the SportsNet LA standoff, the legacies of Dodgers Chair Mark Walter, President & CEO Stan Kasten and Partner Magic Johnson have been "discounted far deeper than 30%." Their stewardship has been "badly stained," and only a new TV deal in the final year of broadcaster Vin Scully can "restore their credibility" (L.A. TIMES, 3/25). An L.A. TIMES editorial stated it is "encouraging to see Time Warner offer the channel at a price closer to the industry average" for RSNs, but it also noted the deal "would be good for just one year." Inflated by "huge payments for exclusive broadcasting rights, the price of sports channels has become unsustainable." TWC's struggles to sell SportsNet LA are "a sign pay-TV providers and team owners need to change their expectations for what cable subscribers will pay for programming -- while there still are cable subscribers" (L.A. TIMES, 3/24).
SHAME GAME: YAHOO SPORTS' Jeff Passan wrote the Dodgers, TWC, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti on Wednesday "orchestrated a four-pronged attack to try and shame DirecTV and others into offering to their customers" SportsNet LA. They said that it would be "wrong if Dodgers fans didn’t get to watch the final season" of Vin Scully, ignoring that most of them missed the previous two seasons because the $8.3B TWC promised the Dodgers for 25 seasons of local rights "meant excessive costs transferred to the consumer." The standoff is the "consequence of sporting avarice, of teams valuing their TV rights above all and either ignoring or simply not understanding the changing landscape of content and how it was bound to turn this deal into a lemon." The Dodgers are "still getting their money, and it’s enough that they’ve yet to shift their disappointment toward Time Warner for not fulfilling its end of the deal" (SPORTS.YAHOO.com, 3/24).
