oceanists
Active Member
MLB to fans: You're irrelevant
By Tim Keown
Page 2
There aren't many worse ways for a business to treat its customers than to restrict access to its product. This seems like basic economics, and basic marketing, and basic public relations, but it's not basic when it comes to Major League Baseball. When it comes to the custodians of that kind of product, the customer is not always right.
In fact, the customer -- the customer lining up with money in his hand, mind you -- is irrelevant.
And when it comes to MLB's apparently inevitable decision to sign an exclusive deal with DirecTV to carry its Extra Innings package -- and thereby deny access to the product to 70 million current and potential customers -- calling the paying customer "irrelevant" is the nicest possible phrasing.
For $700 million over seven years, MLB is willing to give DirecTV exclusivity. This will take the games off a basic cable package and force fans who want to continue watching nearly every game every night to purchase DirecTV. It's an incredibly horrendous business decision.
I confess to taking this personally. I bought the package for the first time last year from my friendly local cable operator and immediately lost interest in the rest of my life. That's only a minor exaggeration; having the ability to surf through to find the best game every night, not tied to the fortunes of the local teams -- I mean, what else is there? Sitting there on a warm summer night, watching the last out of a game in San Diego and then quickly switching to Los Angeles to catch the final six or seven outs of the Dodgers game -- I'm not sure I can go on without it.
(Oh, and it had the added bonus, boss, of allowing me to do practical research on players I needed to profile for The Magazine.)
But that's over. Tough luck for me and a lot of others, including a lot of elderly people who love baseball, can't get to games and might not have the benefit of a south-facing roof.
As many others, most eloquently King Kaufman on Salon.com and Sen. John Kerry, have pointed out, what does MLB care? The bean-arrangers in the business office don't give a damn that I sit there with my four baseball-mad sons and talk about everyone from Tampa Bay to Seattle. They don't give a damn about the old guy in the retirement home who makes his way through the day with a ballgame as his companion.
For 700 million scoots over seven years, why would they care about such minutiae?
They don't care because they employ a simple law, the one that says if you got 'em by the gray hairs, you'll have 'em forever. What am I going to do, hate baseball? Stop watching the games I do get to protest those I don't?
That won't happen, and they know that.
So there.
By Tim Keown
Page 2
There aren't many worse ways for a business to treat its customers than to restrict access to its product. This seems like basic economics, and basic marketing, and basic public relations, but it's not basic when it comes to Major League Baseball. When it comes to the custodians of that kind of product, the customer is not always right.
In fact, the customer -- the customer lining up with money in his hand, mind you -- is irrelevant.
And when it comes to MLB's apparently inevitable decision to sign an exclusive deal with DirecTV to carry its Extra Innings package -- and thereby deny access to the product to 70 million current and potential customers -- calling the paying customer "irrelevant" is the nicest possible phrasing.
For $700 million over seven years, MLB is willing to give DirecTV exclusivity. This will take the games off a basic cable package and force fans who want to continue watching nearly every game every night to purchase DirecTV. It's an incredibly horrendous business decision.
I confess to taking this personally. I bought the package for the first time last year from my friendly local cable operator and immediately lost interest in the rest of my life. That's only a minor exaggeration; having the ability to surf through to find the best game every night, not tied to the fortunes of the local teams -- I mean, what else is there? Sitting there on a warm summer night, watching the last out of a game in San Diego and then quickly switching to Los Angeles to catch the final six or seven outs of the Dodgers game -- I'm not sure I can go on without it.
(Oh, and it had the added bonus, boss, of allowing me to do practical research on players I needed to profile for The Magazine.)
But that's over. Tough luck for me and a lot of others, including a lot of elderly people who love baseball, can't get to games and might not have the benefit of a south-facing roof.
As many others, most eloquently King Kaufman on Salon.com and Sen. John Kerry, have pointed out, what does MLB care? The bean-arrangers in the business office don't give a damn that I sit there with my four baseball-mad sons and talk about everyone from Tampa Bay to Seattle. They don't give a damn about the old guy in the retirement home who makes his way through the day with a ballgame as his companion.
For 700 million scoots over seven years, why would they care about such minutiae?
They don't care because they employ a simple law, the one that says if you got 'em by the gray hairs, you'll have 'em forever. What am I going to do, hate baseball? Stop watching the games I do get to protest those I don't?
That won't happen, and they know that.
So there.
