Thanks for the excellent article! My Dad was an excellent athlete, and we grew up together watching sporting events. He really enjoyed watching NFL and baseball games, as did I since that is when we would talk about life. My sons became soccer players, and my oldest played in the D2 national championships as the winning goalie. What a thrill.
Now, we won't pay for the corporate extortion of our national sporting events. The NFL will kill itself soon enough now that it has incorporated online, in-the-moment gambling. The media has ruined the essence of sports and constantly interrupts the emotion of the sport by interjecting sideline reporters or in-game reporters. The interviews are meaningless, the analysis is meaningless, and it all interrupts the actual flow of the game that we get to watch for maybe 5 minutes before they need to run gambling or car commercials. Media today is unwatchable, and as such, we don't watch anymore. My family of tiny grandbaby athletes continues to grow, and we continue to support community sports where we aren't extorted to pay expensive viewing fees to watch a sport played innocently by our children.
This whole media mess is a good argument for participating in local sports, either as a player or as an in-person fan at local school, college or community sports, rather than watching sports on a screen.
There is another option to watch soccer events: get VPN and watch the national TV stations of the country whose clubs you want to watch. I assume you and/or your dad speak Spanish. All other Americans need to learn at least one foreign language if they want to participate in this scheme.
US citizens can no longer insulate themselves, if they want to participate (or watch) international events.
Regardless of the awfulness of AI captions, some human-generated captions are really bad too. Who cares? It can help my hearing impaired mother watch the news, or allow me to hear a European drama in the original spoken language (with imperfect English captions). I wish they'd just hire more humans to do the work.
I have already started my boycott of the greedy Ellison monsters. Rabid sports fan since the mid 70's but no more. It is a chore to watch and avoid the gambling bullshit. I began to lose interest when the NIL garbage started. If and only IF the American public wakes up and stops feeding into the corporation mindset of "but of course you will watch and pay what we dictate" then and only then can the bastards be beaten.
I think the All-or-Nothing business model is doomed to fail. Consumers want to customize everything these days! (How much room will this app take up on our TV platform? How much will it cost and who can afford it?)
I'm sad for HBO, especially John Oliver. I would be willing to boycott and delete HBO in the future ... Just as I've done with Apple, Amazon, Amazon prime, the Washington Post, and several others ...
I canceled our Paramount subscription awhile ago out of protest for the poor CBS decisions. The only thing that we have really missed is NFL football. Settling at the moment for Thursday and Sunday evenings, plus the occasional Netflix special. In the grand scheme of things, a small price for democracy, but I am hoping that the future will become brighter and more sane with cancelling everything in protest will no longer be necessary. Maybe too wishful, but that is my hope.
Whatever happened to stopping monopolies to protect consumers? Are we eventually going to have one grocery chain across America and they can fix the price of food in any way they choose? As for the sports monopolies, the only league where local sports are not pay per view in my state is the NFL (a monopoly) and that probably won’t last too much longer.
Baseball fan here, no subscription streaming or viewing. Out of 162 regular season games, I can watch about two dozen over the air, and listen to all of them. Baseball has a long history in radio broadcasts, can other sports develop and promote the descriptive eloquence I hear all summer?
No one HAS to watch anything. Between these media mergers on the way to Universal OmniCorps "you don't OWN anything and you never will" subscription model, taxpayer subsidies for stadiums, the billionaire owners' endless greed, and the ridiculous, over-the-top obsession with sports and athletes, we're well on the way to a future that's as dystopian as any imagined.
Thanks for the excellent article! My Dad was an excellent athlete, and we grew up together watching sporting events. He really enjoyed watching NFL and baseball games, as did I since that is when we would talk about life. My sons became soccer players, and my oldest played in the D2 national championships as the winning goalie. What a thrill.
Now, we won't pay for the corporate extortion of our national sporting events. The NFL will kill itself soon enough now that it has incorporated online, in-the-moment gambling. The media has ruined the essence of sports and constantly interrupts the emotion of the sport by interjecting sideline reporters or in-game reporters. The interviews are meaningless, the analysis is meaningless, and it all interrupts the actual flow of the game that we get to watch for maybe 5 minutes before they need to run gambling or car commercials. Media today is unwatchable, and as such, we don't watch anymore. My family of tiny grandbaby athletes continues to grow, and we continue to support community sports where we aren't extorted to pay expensive viewing fees to watch a sport played innocently by our children.
This whole media mess is a good argument for participating in local sports, either as a player or as an in-person fan at local school, college or community sports, rather than watching sports on a screen.
There is another option to watch soccer events: get VPN and watch the national TV stations of the country whose clubs you want to watch. I assume you and/or your dad speak Spanish. All other Americans need to learn at least one foreign language if they want to participate in this scheme.
US citizens can no longer insulate themselves, if they want to participate (or watch) international events.
It's a great way to start learning a language - captions
No - sorry - I know three other languages, and believe me those captions are laughably wrong. Artificial and not intelligent.
I have to agree with you. These are live broadcasts and I think the captions are by AI, which is very unintelligent in these cases.
AI cannot even produce English captions accurately.
Regardless of the awfulness of AI captions, some human-generated captions are really bad too. Who cares? It can help my hearing impaired mother watch the news, or allow me to hear a European drama in the original spoken language (with imperfect English captions). I wish they'd just hire more humans to do the work.
I have already started my boycott of the greedy Ellison monsters. Rabid sports fan since the mid 70's but no more. It is a chore to watch and avoid the gambling bullshit. I began to lose interest when the NIL garbage started. If and only IF the American public wakes up and stops feeding into the corporation mindset of "but of course you will watch and pay what we dictate" then and only then can the bastards be beaten.
I think the All-or-Nothing business model is doomed to fail. Consumers want to customize everything these days! (How much room will this app take up on our TV platform? How much will it cost and who can afford it?)
I'm sad for HBO, especially John Oliver. I would be willing to boycott and delete HBO in the future ... Just as I've done with Apple, Amazon, Amazon prime, the Washington Post, and several others ...
I canceled our Paramount subscription awhile ago out of protest for the poor CBS decisions. The only thing that we have really missed is NFL football. Settling at the moment for Thursday and Sunday evenings, plus the occasional Netflix special. In the grand scheme of things, a small price for democracy, but I am hoping that the future will become brighter and more sane with cancelling everything in protest will no longer be necessary. Maybe too wishful, but that is my hope.
Whatever happened to stopping monopolies to protect consumers? Are we eventually going to have one grocery chain across America and they can fix the price of food in any way they choose? As for the sports monopolies, the only league where local sports are not pay per view in my state is the NFL (a monopoly) and that probably won’t last too much longer.
That was when our country was a democracy.
Today America is run by the rich.
Double yuck!!
Oh darn!! Reading books is SO hard!
Disgusted.
Looks like I will be cutting back on watching golf. They are definitely un American.
Don't want them to have anything to do with me.
Yuck!!
Excellent article. Just one more perspective on how this merger lets everyone of us down.
Time to start watching in other languages?
I'm Spanish and speak Spanish natively, fwiw.
Well written. This makes me so angry.
Baseball fan here, no subscription streaming or viewing. Out of 162 regular season games, I can watch about two dozen over the air, and listen to all of them. Baseball has a long history in radio broadcasts, can other sports develop and promote the descriptive eloquence I hear all summer?
No one HAS to watch anything. Between these media mergers on the way to Universal OmniCorps "you don't OWN anything and you never will" subscription model, taxpayer subsidies for stadiums, the billionaire owners' endless greed, and the ridiculous, over-the-top obsession with sports and athletes, we're well on the way to a future that's as dystopian as any imagined.
It puts in words that rhyme with what was said but have a totally different meaning.