After nearly two full seasons of Washington Nationals baseball in the nation’s capital, 1.6 Comcast cable subscribers will finally be getting Nats games at home. While DIRECTV, Cox and others in the DC area receive the Nationals games from Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN) for free, Comcast subscribers will enjoy a $2 monthly fee tacked on to their cable bills for carrying MASN. This is not an optional subscription fee like DIRECTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket, it’s a permanent hike, and it will provide $38.4 million in annual revenue for Comcast.

Fewer than 150,000* DC-area residents are likely to watch Nats games on TV. But if Comcast were to earn the same $38.4 million by selling subscriptions only to Nats viewers, they would have to charge them $44 per month. That’s money they can more easily extract from all 1.6 million Comcast customers in the DC area.

It gets better. Comcast extended basic TV comes with 76 channels, which for the sake of argument, provide 24 hours of programming for the local-monopoly price of about $46 per month. So 100 hours of TV on any of those channels will cost you about 8 cents.

If MASN broadcasts all 162 Washington Nationals games each year, and we assume that a baseball game takes 3 hours, that $2 fee from Comcast will be costing it DC-area customers $4.94 per 100 hours of Nationals baseball in the 2007 season.

But Comcast is more cunning that simply charging DC residents 60 times the normal per-hour cable program rate. They also chose to cut a deal with MASN at the very end of the 2006 season, meaning that they will broadcast a maximum of 22 games this year. So for the seven months between September of 2006 and Major League Baseball’s opening day of April 1, 2007, Comcast will broadcast about 66 hours of Nats games for the low, low price of $14. That comes out to $21.21 per 100 hours of programming!

Rest assured, Comcast isn’t going to make any money from this. Comcast executive vice president David Cohen said in a statement that, “Comcast does not intend to profit from the carriage of this new network, but its significant cost makes it necessary to pass along a price increase to our customers. It will cost literally hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade to provide MASN….”

I’m sure the shareholders are going to be pleased to hear that Comcast isn’t broadcasting Major League Baseball for a profit. So are Nats games just unusually expensive to film and distribute? Not according to MASN. They told Reuters that Comcast would be paying about $1.25 per customer per month. MASN also estimated that Comcast could make back another $.60 per cable customer on advertising. After subtracting MASN fees and adding in their advertising revenue, Comcast’s net income will be about $15 million for broadcasting 22 Nationals games between September 7, 2006 and March 31, 2007.

If you’d like to switch to DIRECTV now, click here. Statastico earns nothing from this hyperlink, just a little satisfaction.

Go Nats!

Sources: Statastic research; Washington Post; Comcast

Notes: *How many Nats TV viewers are there? It’s hard to say since there has never been full cable coverage. San Francisco had about 144,000 regular TV viewers the year after their Giants were in the World Series. This is likely a good proxy because it has a similar metro-area population and the Oakland A’s compete for viewers, much as the Baltimore Orioles do.

Post a Comment | Trackback URI