dougthonus wrote:jnrjr79 wrote:Except none of this is true re: CHSN! The app is only one of three options to watch the team, including one that is free..
1: CHSN and NBA team pass are both streaming options which are owned by different legal entities
2: NBA team pass is the cheaper streaming option (presently)
3: NBA team pass is barred from competing in the local market due to the league and team colluding
4: Chicago based residents that want a legal streaming app are forced to pay more than non Chicago streamers due to the above collusion
5: OTA is not available to everyone nor is it an equivalent service to a streaming app (same could be said for fubo/spectrum)
Now these 5 points do not constitute a legal opinion on whether a lawsuit would be successful or whether damages would be significant enough for anyone to care or try, but they are true, so instead of saying "none of this is true" maybe "none of this matters" is more accurate (I'm not sure it matters, but I do think its true).Relatedly, this is not price gouging in the legal sense of that term, even if you think it's a rip-off compared to League Pass. It also disregards that CHSN is an actual television network with production costs; League Pass is not, it's just licensing and redistributing content. Even if it were price gouging, price gouging is mostly legal, except for some states that forbid it for certain commodities after a disaster/supply disruption and the like.
The main gripe about CHSN is really just that people have Comcast or YouTube TV and they're mad that they can't see the network there. But this ignores that CHSN has tried to get those providers to pick up the channel, but the providers don't want to! This isn't CHSN being anti-competitive. It's just a lack of interest in its product.
I think the other area where you get into trouble with price gauging is when you are colluding with your monopolistic powers to do it which is the case here.
At any rate, it's probably nothing in the short term, and I've talked about it too much relative to what the likely risk is, but I do think this is a long term problem for the league.
In the end your broader point is that people whom were able to get this stuff effectively bundled into a service they had previously are now forced to pay out money which is why its an inflection point potentially that the cheapest route for them may be not be available. Whether the same collusion was a problem a year ago may also have been true, but it was so widely accepted and existed for so long there was no reason to argue about it, and it was largely bundled into something they were already paying for.
Now that you are forcing some people to pay effectively $360 more for the same service they used to pay (if you wanted all 3 teams) it creates a point where people may rethink "is this really okay?", and clearly people don't think its okay. People are incredibly pissed.
Again, maybe there isn't enough juice there for someone to try and squeeze the orange. Without multiple years of damages and with OTA as an option to say a huge group of the class had another option available, it is definitely plausible there is no case here.
Just laying out what troubles could exist and why.
I'll drop it after this because we've obviously spent too much time hashing it out at this point, but when I said "none of this is true," what I meant was the thrust of your argument - that people are being forced to pay for the streaming app - is untrue. CHSN is now offering people more ways to access the content than have ever existed before, including for free, so the idea that now is when there would be antitrust concern for CHSN is backwards. The prior setup, where the same company owns the biggest cable company and also owns the RSN, is the context where you might have some concern. RSNs typically come under antitrust scrutiny where it appears there is an effort to deny carriage to other providers (e.g. if Comcast owns the RSN, it may only make the RSN available to competing TV providers for exorbitant fees, knowing that if those providers won't agree, it could drive subscriptions for Comcast, and if they do agree 1) Comcast makes money and 2) the competitor has a harder time competing from a price perspective, because it has to pass those fees through to the consumer). Here, CHSN is trying to make itself available to as many outlets as possible. The fact that they can't seem to give the product away to YTTV and Comcast does not create an antirust concern for it - quite the opposite.
