TV No Longer Home of the Free

It wasn’t the words so much as the man who said them.

In an interview with The Times’ Sallie Hofmeister, Peter Chernin, chief operating officer of Fox’s parent News. Corp., was asked if he could foresee major sports on free television moving strictly to pay television.

“I believe in advertising, but a secondary stream is a good thing to have,” Chernin said. “Inevitably, that will lead to major sporting events being available only on pay TV.”

Those words carry weight, coming from Rupert Murdoch’s right-hand man, a bigwig in a company that already shows the NFL, major league baseball and NASCAR on its national broadcast network and the majority of local teams on its regional sports networks and is trying to buy DirecTV.

Will the American sports fan, already priced out of so many stadiums, have to shell out more cash just to watch games at home?

To some degree, we already do. No self-respecting sports fan could live without ESPN and a regional sports network. That makes cable or satellite mandatory, even if only to catch the home teams in action. For boxing, you need HBO and Showtime merely to see regular fights, let alone the title bouts on pay-per-view.

About 70% of U.S. television households have cable. From this state it isn’t such a grand leap to shifting all sporting events off the networks and onto cable.

Even Chernin said, “It’s not something we would like to do as a company.” Well, News Corp. probably didn’t like the Dodgers eating Carlos Perez’s contract either, but it did so in the name of business.

After that, the next step for TV after all-cable leagues would be to move big draws such as the Super Bowl, World Series and The Masters--the “celebratory events,” as sports television consultant Neal Pilson calls them--onto pay-per-view.

Given the weakening economy and shrinking advertising budgets, it’s not too difficult to envision that day. But does it have to be inevitable?

“If you use the word ‘inevitably,’ 50-100 years from now, we may be in a situation where you are automatically billed for what you watch,” said Pilson, the former CBS Sports president who now runs his own firm, Pilson Communications. “But we’re a long way from that.

“The fact of the matter is, these major events depend upon broad public support for their popularity. On a pay-per-view situation, instead of 210 million households looking at an event, you might have 250,000 looking at an event. I just don’t see the big, popular American sports currently on free TV migrating [to pay].”

Pilson also indicated that leagues could face anti-trust issues if they took their games off free TV.

DirecTV already offers packages that allow consumers to watch out-of-market games in the NBA, NHL, MLS, baseball and college football and basketball. The crown jewel of the company’s fall marketing is its exclusive rights to the NFL “Sunday Ticket” plan.

Jane Hancock, DirecTV’s vice president of marketing, said that individual package purchasers include transplanted fans watching their hometown team, super fans of an entire sport, fans who want to follow individual players or alumni watching their old schools.

Will an extra subscription become necessary simply for L.A. fans to watch the Lakers?

“I’m not sure I have that crystal ball,” Hancock said. “I would hope that we would not go to that model, that we would continue to provide a variety of options to customers on a local basis, from local professional teams to a package that would give the whole variety to sports fans.

“My hope would be that we have that. You can’t just have an elite group of people that are buying a service. It has to be a mix across the board.”

Technological advances, including high-speed Internet access, will allow more options for fans--and more potential revenue streams for leagues and broadcasters.

ESPN, Comcast and a group called Aerocast made this summer’s X Games available over the Internet. The NFL has experimented with making games available for free online in Austria and Singapore.

But that requires high-speed access, and broadband--the next wave of the Internet--hasn’t washed ashore yet. For the most part it remains adrift because of bureaucratic bungling and insufficient service. (Pilson’s own office in Chappaqua, N.Y., was just wired after a two-year wait).

Cable operators are trying to force digital cable down subscribers’ throats. In Portland, Ore., where the Trail Blazers already broke ground by televising home games on pay-per-view (even during the NBA playoffs), fans are now caught in a battle between the team and AT&T; Cable, which wants to make the team’s games available only on digital cable (at $39.99 a month).

If this seems ominous, at least there’s what Pilson calls the Receding Horizon Phenomenon: “Things don’t happen as fast as we think they will.”

But it might also be time to take stock and think about what we would be willing to pay for and what we could live without.

I’m already preparing to draw the line. (Keep in mind, this is coming from a person who takes compasses on house-hunting trips to make sure my new place will have access to DirecTV’s satellite, a guy who has to have Sunday Ticket and the NBA’s League Pass).

I’d pay to watch Tiger Woods on Sundays. I wouldn’t pay to watch Phil Mickelson on Sundays.

I’d pay to watch Shaq and Kobe, Vince, Iverson and T-Mac. I wouldn’t pay to watch the New York Knicks.

I’d pay to watch baseball in October. I wouldn’t pay to watch baseball any other time of the year.

I’d pay to see Mario Lemieux continue his comeback. I wouldn’t pay to see Michael Jordan come out of retirement (not as long as I still have videotapes of MJ in his prime).

I’d pay to see college basketball’s Final Four. I wouldn’t pay to see a college football “championship” game that inevitably excludes a deserving team.

I would not pay to see a heavyweight fight between Hasim Rahman and Lennox Lewis.

I’d pay to see them on “Up Close.”

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J.A. Adande can be reached at: j.a.adande@latimes.com.