Hard to tell who is the bad guy here, but my gut feeling is the Braves should celebrate the day that Liberty Media acquired the Braves from Time-Warner. An excellent article about how greed trumps everything in the LA TV market:
By JEFF PASSAN
Yahoo! Sports
A metaphysical question, with a slight twist: If a baseball game is played and no one can see it on TV, does the baseball game really count?
The standings say yes. The statistics agree. And yet to the greater Los Angeles area, 70 percent of whom cannot watch the Dodgers in the comfort of their homes, they might as well not exist. The most expensive team money can buy is also the most expensive mistake in the short history of wildly overpriced, patently absurd local-television-rights deals.
For an estimated $8.3 billion, Time Warner Cable bought the rights to the Dodgers and created SportsNet LA. Time Warner then suggested to cable and satellite providers that they pay at least $4 a month to carry the channel, a fee they would pass along to subscribers. Every one of them kindly told Time Warner to suck a lemon, and so here we are, with the most popular baseball team in the game's second-biggest media market practically blacking itself out on account of its own efforts to fatten its pockets.
And let's not twist this any other way: This is a Dodgers issue and a Time Warner issue, and any effort to spin it otherwise is revisionism. When you have a product like the TV rights to a baseball team, and the value of those TV rights is an ever-moving and nebulous dollar amount, it is incumbent on the parties paying those dollars and receiving those dollars to ensure they will recoup those dollars one way or another.
Everybody in the television business agrees: DirecTV, the satellite giant, sets the standard with sports programming – and should continue to do so even after its purchase by AT&T over the weekend. When it agrees to a carriage deal, the rest of the providers fall in line and do the same. For Time Warner to promise the Dodgers an average of more than $330 million a season for the next 25 years without even a soft carriage agreement in place with DirecTV is malpractice, a monster bet on an audience it clearly did not understand.
Were cancellation orders flowing in on account of the Dodgers' invisibility, surely DirecTV would reconsider its tack, much as it did when the Lakers launched their own network and fans cried foul at its absence on satellite. More than a quarter of the 2014 baseball season has passed, and DirecTV is firm as ever in its stand, which is frightening for the Dodgers, because it reinforces a troublesome truth: By chasing every last dollar and choosing Time Warner, a direct competitor to DirecTV and other providers, they failed to protect their greatest asset. Not a TV contract but a team.
Naturally, the buck-passing is starting, cracks in the unified Dodgers-Time Warner front apparent. Peter Guber, one of the Dodgers' co-owners, recently told the Los Angeles Times: "We sold the rights to a gigantic corporation, it's their job to market the rights and get the distribution. We are not happy that they haven't been able to get the full distribution in our own market that they promised. That's their job. They made the bet."
Actually, this bet was two-fold. The Dodgers bet on Time Warner to fulfill its duties, fully aware that an inability to do so would render them mute in a Los Angeles sports scene that thrives on noise.
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