Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
Sure it's only the middle of February, but baseball season is just around the corner.
Yesterday the Dodgers pitchers and catchers reported for Spring training.
Meanwhile, back in LA, it's looking like another season when most of us won't be able to watch the Dodgers on TV.
That's thanks to Charter Communications. For the fourth year in a row, they've been unable to reach an agreement with DirecTV or any other cable/satellite providers to broadcast Dodgers games.
Meg James has been covering this story for years now for the LA Times. She spoke with Take Two's A Martinez for more.
The new players in this situation
We have different players here. Now the distributor who carries the channel is not Time Warner Cable; it's a company out of Connecticut called Charter, which bought Time Warner Cable last year and sort of inherited this problem of an automatic contract for the Dodger's Channel.
On the optimism that this would finally be the season a deal would be reached
I think there was a lot of optimism largely because the games were available on broadcast over the air TV channel 5 at the end of last season. Because the companies really wanted to allow long-time fans who did not have time warner cable or charter spectrum service to see Vin Scully's last few games so this deal was reached that Channel 5 broadcast the last few games of Scully's career. People thought, 'Oh! This might be a signal that come next Spring we'll get the Dodgers on broadcast TV,' but that's not the case.
On why the Dodgers would want to make this deal happen
The Dodgers have been hammered PR wise for the channel. They own the channel but their channel is not widely seen in LA. keep in mind there are more than 2 million homes in LA that do have the channel. So it's not like it's a total blackout. But the Dodgers are in an awkward spot because they made this very lucrative deal with Time Warner. They're making hundreds of millions of dollars a year, their revenue is guaranteed from Charter. So they don't have a business incentive to change the deal because the revenue is guaranteed. Long term, it's not a great proposition for the Dodgers because as time goes on and people don't watch the product, it becomes less valuable for them.
So... are we going to see Dodger baseball on the homes that have been in the dark so far?
It's not going to happen, at least at the front part of this season.
To hear the full conversation, click the blue player above