I'll bet you any amount that you care to wager that the salaries for NBA/NFL/MLB players don't drop by anything close to 90% at any point in the next 10 years.
> Threatened by Internet streaming services and a fragmenting TV audience, Comcast/NBC, ESPN, Fox Sports, Turner, and CBS have agreed over the last 20 months to spend $72 billion for the TV rights to professional, Olympic, and college sports well into the next decade.
> In some TV markets, Abdoulah said, sports channels account for 60 percent of the overall programming costs in the cable-TV bill because of fees for regional sports networks.
Yes, cable is not a la carte. That doesn't automatically mean that you're subsidizing ESPN. Maybe it's the people that sign up for cable solely to get ESPN that are subsidizing all the other channels.
You are correct that mathematically, I have not proven the direction of total subsidization.
However:
> In some TV markets, Abdoulah said, sports channels account for 60 percent of the overall programming costs in the cable-TV bill because of fees for regional sports networks.
I guarantee that it is not the case that greater than 60 percent of people who sign up for cable do so solely to watch sports. So, in certain markets, it is for sure people like me who subsidize sports programming, not the other way around.
Generally I start from the point of view that gross mis-pricings where there are multiple buyers and sellers involved are pretty rare. So the various TV organizations are probably paying about as much for sports broadcasting rights as their customers are willing to pay for them. Maybe it's off a bit one way or the other but certainly not by a factor of 10 (as you claimed above).
That's basically what I think unless I'm presented with very strong evidence to the contrary.
Remember, cable is merely the carrier. I assert that $0 of what I pay my cable company should go to pay for programming (other than Pay-Per-View), considering that programming already has advertising. If I want to pay for Premium content (like HBO, Sports), then Cable could mediate that. But that's not the relationship we have today, at all.
Cable companies are certainly not just a carrier. They pay all kinds of money in order to put together a package of programming that is popular enough for them to attract a large subscriber base. They do this because that's how they think they can best run their business.
You can assert all you want about how you think the cable company should spend it's money, but you don't get all that much of a say in the matter.
