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Time Warner Cable to Take Staggering Loss on Bad Dodger Deal

Mar 24, 2015  •  Post A Comment

Time Warner Cable is set to take a massive loss on its deal for TV rights to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Writing in the New York Post, Claire Atkinson reports the the writedown is expected to be as high as $1 billion.

“Time Warner Cable and Dodgers fans are facing a second season of silence from West Coast TV distributors who, so far, are balking at the price for carrying Time Warner Cable’s SportsNet LA, which carries the Dodgers games exclusively,” Atkinson writes. “The cable operator paid rights owners, led by Guggenheim Partners, $8.35 billion over 25 years, but has not been able to get rival pay-TV operators to carry the network at around $5 per subscriber per month.”

As a result, about 70% of households in Southern California do not get the team’s games, Atkinson notes, with sources hinting that more of the same appears to be in the cards for the coming season. According to the report, the $5 price tag may be too high.

Please click on the link in the first paragraph for more on this story.

 

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4 Comments

  1. It’s hard to feel bad for Time Warner Cable. They overpaid and got burned. Maybe this will teach other cable operators that some of us don’t want to pay through the nose for sports. It’s bad enough that they force ESPN onto all but the most bare-bones packages. Can’t wait to unbundle and only pay for channels (or shows) I really want.

  2. You are absolutely correct; I am not feeling sorry for Time Warner. Sometime less is more, if Time warner would have accepted less fee per subscriber from other cable networks; they would have collect millions already. Playing hardball is expensive. Getting Dodgers fans angry is even more costly.
    70% of Southern California folks are not able to watch the Dodgers on TV is also costly to the Dodgers organization.

  3. Sports are a luxury, especially in an area like Los Angeles where there are so many other entertainment options. LA hardly blinked when pro football left town, and hasn’t really missed it. The Dodgers are equally dispensable, especially when you have another baseball team in town and when fans no longer feel the same loyalty owing to the corporate nature of Dodger ownership.

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