Players and Payers

Don’t like sports? Too bad. If you’re a cable subscriber, you’re paying through the nose for them anyway.

About a third of the average household’s monthly cable bill (excluding premium channels and pay-per-view) goes to ESPN, Fox Sports and other sports networks, according to media industry consulting firm Kagan Research. That probably doesn’t bother sports junkies, but it’s a sore subject for those who couldn’t care less. And those viewers are going to end up subsidizing a lot more sports with the shift of ABC’s venerable “Monday Night Football” to ESPN starting in 2006.

Sports are a big and increasingly expensive industry -- witness the $8.8-billion price tag attached to the National Football League’s eight-year television contract with Walt Disney Co. (parent company of ABC and ESPN) to broadcast 17 games a year. Toss in the league’s contracts with NBC (Sunday night game broadcasts), CBS, News Corp.’s Fox (Sunday afternoon games) and satellite provider DirecTV, and the NFL will collect $23 billion in television rights spread over the next eight years.

Fueled largely by programming fee hikes demanded by sports networks, monthly cable bills have risen steadily in recent years, a trend likely to worsen. ESPN says it won’t increase programming fees to pay for “Monday Night Football,” but when its contracts with cable systems are renewed, the network undoubtedly will try to offset its higher costs with higher rates. So will NBC, which will want to raise prices for its cable channels, such as MSNBC, the USA Network and Bravo, to make up for the costs of its NFL deal. Ditto for the other networks that broadcast sports.

Cable operators have proposed a solution that makes sense: pushing sports networks out of basic cable packages and parking them in higher-cost tiers so customers could decide whether sports programming is worth the added cost.

But sports networks, leagues and advertisers are dead set against that idea because they want their broadcasts and commercials to run in front of the greatest possible number of eyeballs.

The cable industry is headed in the right direction, but it’s not going far enough. Why not let the free market sort it all out? Let viewers pick programming on an a la carte basis -- choosing their own packages from a menu in which each network has a set price. It’s a revolutionary idea, but so was football under the lights on Monday nights.