SlingTVers be aware ESPN may not be available today.

[UTE98]

Last night after the UW-UCLA game I couldn’t sleep so was watching FIBA women’s basketball US v China. At halftime ESPN went black. 

SlingTV put up a message that Disney didn’t agree to their terms. So ESPN was not available. ESPN knows live sports are valuable so probably holding SlingTV hostage during football season. Man I hate Cable, Streaming and other money grubbing networks using live sports as a pawn in their negotiation games. 

Congress needs to step in and stop mid-season tiffs, or maybe I need to file a Conusumer Protection complaint. LOL

So be warned, I haven’t checked this morning yet.

[PlainsUte]

Honestly, when you look at where the money for the multi-million dollar coaches salaries and multi-million player salaries in pro sports are coming from, namely the networks like ESPN and Fox, the money has to come from somewhere, and ad revenue is getting tougher to get with rise of social media and other online ad buying, so they play hardball with the distributors to get some income direct from viewers. 

At least the streaming service I subscribe to (a local fiber service) gives a lot of flexibility to viewers in choosing channels so we can pay for stuff we really want to see vs. cable we had whose channel packages were much more broad.