I, for one, welcome our new overlords (from ESPN)

100 million households subscribe to pay TV?

 

BYH wants to know what you were doing in those eight seconds.

 

The more I think about it, the more I realize I really don't watch ESPN very much. I watch the Chicago sports station. I watch the networks for football, and I watch MLB Network for baseball news. If anything I'd need it and the Big Ten Network for college basketball and that's about it.

 

I think they mean pay as in "cable" or "satellite," not as in "HBO/Showtime/etc."

That's easily believable.

 

She must be watching reruns. PR moved to Lifetime four years ago

That being said, I wouldn't get ESPN. I wouldn't get any sports networks. I'd get Showtime (well maybe not since Dexter is ending), Bravo, Lifetime, HGTV, Food Network, the ABCs, NBCs, etc. of the world, TNT and TBS. Maybe 1-2 more. That's all I would need. Instead, I have like 4000 channels I'm paying $100 a month for and I watch less than 1 percent of them.

 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau website, there are only 114,761,359 households in the U.S. If that's the case, there are not 100 million households with cable or satellite.

 

That $5 per subscriber is exactly why ESPN will fight to prevent ala carte TV deals. My mother wouldn't get ESPN at $5 per month, much less $10 or $20. But she's paying that now, even though I think her TV is permanently tuned to HGTV or The Weather Channel.

 

Here is just one Google search that shows U.S. pay-TV penetration to be 86 percent. If that's the case, it's about exactly 100 million households.

http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/television/us-among-top-10-countries-by-pay-tv-penetration-34936/

Cable alone, without satellite, regularly discusses monopoly concerns with the FCC. The threshold is that if cable is in 70 percent of homes, they get treated more strictly. So they always come in just under that in the reported numbers. Throw in the 15-20 percent that go satellite and, yeah, that's 85-90 percent, or 100 million households.

 

"I would not subscribe to ESPN," said the righteous many. "But I would bitch incessantly when it carried something I wanted to watch and no longer had access to."

 

Oh, shit. I'd have to get Nick and Disney Jr. Whew.

 

That is the rub. The biggest thing for me, as I said before, would be the bowl games. But yeah, it would be a bitch-free decision on my part at least. Not for the general public, I know.

I'd go Showtime, my regional sports network, and a couple of the kids channels. We also trip over to the Discovery Channel enough that it'd be worth it.

Sadly enough, my viewing habits now are such that I will sign up for whatever has the syndication rights to Friends.