Columnist Dean Juipe: Get ready to pay extra fee for ESPN

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2003 | 9:22 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

Former baseball star Keith Hernandez was on The O'Reilly Factor, talking with host Bill O'Reilly on the cable TV show about the violence in sports these days.

Rerunning the Game 3 brawl between the Red Sox and Yankees and the fisticuffs that followed in the New York bullpen, as well as showing an assortment of dangerous antics that have occurred in sports in recent months, made for a compelling visual backdrop to the conversation.

Whether feigned or real, the men came across as appalled at what they were seeing. And when it was all said and done, they espoused the belief that young people shouldn't be exposed to such "bad examples of sportsmanship" and that parents may need to limit the sports their children see on television.

However indirectly, Cox Communications may wind up doing that for them.

Cox, the nation's fourth-largest cable-TV distributor, is threatening to move ESPN and Fox Sports Net from its basic-cable package to an elite tier that would require a subscriber to pay an extra monthly fee of $5 or $10. It would place the sports networks on a level with HBO and Showtime, and, in essence, price them out of the range of many a Joe Fan.

O'Reilly and Hernandez aside, this will not sit well with the average cable subscriber (and it will drive even more of them to switch to satellite). ESPN and ESPN2 (as well as FSN to a lesser extent) are staples of the typical fan's TV diet, and deleting them from basic cable will result in an immediate -- if ineffective -- backlash.

The contracts between the program providers and cable distributors expire in a few months and Cox, for one, has already let it be known that it will alter its basic-cable package for its 6.1 million subscribers if ESPN, in particular, does not lower its fees. Las Vegas, where Cox Cable has a monopoly, will be among those affected.

Cox maintains that ESPN and FSN account for only 8 percent of its viewership audience while accounting for 32 percent of its programming costs. This is a result of ESPN charging Cox (and other cable distributors) $2.61 per month per subscriber, while most other channels charge the distributor no more than $1.

There is a tradeoff involved in that Cox gets to sell local ad time on ESPN telecasts.

Cox has also bragged that its 14-percent growth rate is the highest in the industry, and it is alleged (by the programmers' side of the argument) that distributors are operating with a 40-percent profit margin.

Obviously, cable distributors are making good money.

But they want a little more and they're going to blame ESPN to do it, even though it was the advent of ESPN -- particularly after it acquired the rights to NFL games in 1987 -- that fueled cable's rise to prominence.

Could we live without ESPN, whether as a matter of principal or out of financial necessity? Well, I have a friend with two young children who swears he'll never bring cable into the house, so I guess it can be done.

But it would be tough on those of us who turn to it daily for games, scores and highlights.

Better get ready to start setting an extra $10 aside for something that today seems all but free.