Hang tough, Dish! Let Cubs-hating, Trump-despising customers opt out of paying for Marquee Network
Readers with long memories may recall that on Valentine’s Day this year, I bailed on the Chicago Cubs. I had a number of reasons, including my discomfort with the strong financial support for President Donald Trump by most members of the Ricketts family, which owns the team.
But what motivated me finally to renounce the Cubs was the news that in 2020, nearly all the team’s games will be on a proprietary cable/satellite channel estimated to boost subscriber bills by somewhere around $5 a month. That channel, the Marquee Network, is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, a rabidly right-wing media company.
Scores of angry Cubs supporters wrote to rage that nobody cares which team I root for, which was fair enough. Fandom is a very personal thing, though evidently they cared enough to write to me about it. At the same time, scores of others wrote to express solidarity with me along with their determination not to pony up extra dollars on their cable or satellite bills next year to help line the pockets of the Ricketts family.
This form of abstention can be easier said than done. Cable and satellite companies don’t typically offer a la carte channels so subscribers can pay only for what they want to watch and not pay for what they don’t want to watch. This is in part because the individual channels — regional sports networks such as Marquee or NBC Sports Chicago, for example — insist that they be sold to consumers as part of a package deal, a bundle of channels that are included in an overall tier of service.
Why? Because if they weren’t able to spread out the cost among all subscribers, the a la carte price they would have to charge per channel would discourage many casual fans.
“Our back-of-the-envelope math tells us that the Marquee Network would cost subscribers between $50 and $70 a month if it simply were sold on its own,” said Brian Neylon, group president of Dish TV, the satellite service my family happens to subscribe to and that is currently not planning to offer Marquee.
Yes, there are a lot of Cubs fans. But they’re dwarfed, Neylon said, by the number of people who are indifferent to baseball or who are White Sox fans.
“Our view is that those people, the vast majority of our customers, shouldn’t have to subsidize Cubs fans,” he said. “That’s why we say the business model of regional sports networks is broken.”
I like the sound of that. According to Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal, who is all over the Marquee story, Dish and Comcast’s Xfinity service are among the providers that still haven’t agreed to carry the Cubs-only network. Dish has been particularly strong in this area and is still holding out against NBC Sports Chicago, thus depriving me of watching local mediocre pro basketball and hockey.
But all lofty principles aside, these companies are in business to make money. Dish does carry about 10 regional sports networks around the country, Neylon said, including my beloved Big Ten Network. If and when Dish and other holdouts decide they’ll come out ahead if they carry Marquee and charge all their subscribers extra for it, they’ll almost certainly fold.
If they do, I’ll be the one having to make the tough choice.
Life hack: Watch the impeachment inquiry on double speed
The first day of public testimony in the impeachment hearings in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday lasted about 5 ½ hours, which is more time than even most of us political geeks wanted to devote to watching it. The solution — other than watching summaries and highlights at the end of the day — is to click into YouTube’s playback control options and enjoy the proceedings in double time.
Yes, everyone talks very fast, but because the technology correspondingly lowers the pitch, you don’t get the chipmunk effect and voices remain normal. And you’ll find that your brain can take it all in just fine so there’s no reason to miss a single word.
How to do it: Type “impeachment hearings livestream youtube” into your search bar and choose one to watch. If the hearings for the day are already underway, move the slider across the bottom of the image to the left until you’re rewound to opening statements. If you want to watch live, just click the pause icon on the lower left. Then look for the playback speed control — on desktops and laptops it’s hidden behind the “settings” icon that looks like a gear wheel; on mobile devices you need to tap on the image and then on icon that looks like three dots stacked vertically.
Choose the “playback speed” option, which YouTube began rolling out five years ago. It allows users to slow videos down to 25% of normal speed, a boon to musicians trying to figure out tunes, or juice it to 200%, my recommendation for political chat. Go do something else for a while, then come back to your device and watch until you catch up to live action, at which point, obviously, playback reverts to standard speed, click pause again and go about your other business until it’s time to catch up again.
No politician is going to complain that you didn’t experience the full length of their dramatic pauses.
Artists, however, are not particularly happy about viewers having this option, as Netflix has been hearing since announcing in late October that it’s testing a feature that will allow viewers to watch comedies, dramas and action shows at up to 1.5 times normal speed. The option is “frequently requested by our members,” said Keela Robison the company’s vice president for product innovation.
“No, Netflix, no,” tweeted filmmaker Judd Apatow, one of many creative types who are aghast at the prospect. “Don’t make me have to call every director and show creator on Earth to fight you on this. Save me the time. I will win but it will take a ton of time. Don’t (mess) with our timing. We give you nice things. Leave them as they were intended to be seen.”
I’ve tried watching some conventional TV shows and movie clips at accelerated speed and don’t care for it much, actually. Even with pitch control, the movement of the actors is distractingly herky-jerky.
But I want the choice. If I want to try to consume, say, Apatow’s 2015 comedy “Trainwreck” in 80 minutes instead of its approximately two-hour running time, well, that should be up to me if I’m paying to watch it. I feel capable of being the judge of whether absorbing all the nuances of Apatow’s artistic rhythms is worth my time.
“Save me the time” yourself, Apatow.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s reader poll to select the funniest offering on Twitter was, “When an employment application asks who is to be notified in case of emergency, I always write, ‘A very good doctor.’ ” by @pungirlpam.
The poll appears at chicagotribune.com/ zorn, and you can receive an alert when it’s posted by signing up for the Change of Subject email newsletter at chicagotribune.com/newsletters.