Has anyone heard anything about a new deal after next season? I hope whoever they sign with, is fully available to people in the region, or the NBA gets rid of blackouts.
If it's Comcast again, I'll be furious, but I don't think they'll make that mistake twice. They have caught A LOT of flack from fans about Comcast. I personally haven't been able to watch a lot of games since we switched to DirecTV.
People are going to be pissed no matter what. If they offer a full season pass to fans to watch the game, it will probably be like somewhere between $500-1,000 and people will shit their pants. Or they will make a deal with directv and people will shit their pants. Or with dish, or Comcast, or frontier.
I don't care if they stick with Comcast, as long as they don't give the fuckers exclusive rights. They made it impossible to get the team on league pass or any other options. I really hope they offer a streaming service that's outside of the scope of the TV deal.
I just hope they are not exclusive to Comcast again so I can dump them on their fucking face. Only reason I have Comcast is to watch Blazer games with ease.
League pass is like what, 200 bucks? You think they would and better yet, could, ask 500-1000? They'd get zero subscribers.
No way. They want to expand their reach, and I think offering an affordable streaming service would be the best option.
Generally teams don't make deals with service providers; they make deals with content providers (ie, a local network). The problem all along had been that the content provider is OWNED BY a service provider, which gave them no incentive to make the content available via other service providers. Sure, they could have made money by making the content available via satellite, but they would have lost their leverage over their subscribers, so they saw it as a net negative. Long story short, as long as whoever purchases the broadcast rights in the next contract doesn't have some sort of vested interest in content exclusivity (as Comcast did), we won't have the same problem we have now.
The blazers get $12million per year currently from Comcast. I'd expect them to want more money seeing as how that deal was signed long ago. And yeah, it's not league pass, that's a way to get fans outside the city to watch teams. They can charge whatever they want to people inside the "black out zone"
Comcast was able to make a deal with frontier. I'm guessing some of it had to do with dish and directv being assholes too.
Yep...Frontier, Fios, Charter--small players in the market who had little to no impact on their share. Dish and DirecTV have much greater size and reach, so Comcast is threatened by them in ways they aren't by the little guys. The fact that hundreds of other content providers are able to reach mutually beneficial agreements with the satellite companies, but Comcast couldn't find a way--over 10 years, with consistent pressure from the Blazers, their fans, and the media--to make a deal with either one of them, suggests to me that the problem was primarily on Comcast's end, specifically that they were disinclined to reach an agreement that would be positive for their station but would have a negative impact on the size of their customer base.
Frontier might be a "little guy" in the scheme of things, but in Portland, they offer Fios to a substantial amount of Portland suburbs, which directly affects most of the market Comcast is going for in offering Blazer games to the "blacked out" market. And of course the Blazers can "apply pressure." They can say all the right things, and say they are doing everything they can, while sitting back with $12 million/year rolling in because of the deal. Media and outward perception does not always equal the truth in the numbers (as you should very well know). If you haven't noticed yet btw, the Oregonian will write whatever will get people talking about them and/or whatever someone wants them to say if they pay them enough. At the end of the day, people will still be Blazer fans whether they are upset with the team or not. I feel bad for the individuals that had no access to games, but if someone has access to Comcast or Fios and chose to go with Dish or Directv instead, it's their own fault. Every time I have tried to get cable/satellite with a different provider, I've gotten everything I've wanted cheaper through Comcast by talking to customer loyalty reps. Hopefully the Blazers make a pay per game service available to those who do not want to sign up with Comcast (if the blazers renew with them), or make it mandatory that Comcast makes a deal with Dish and Directv, but if Comcast comes calling with a $30-40 million/year offer to continue, It would not surprise me at all if the Blazers accepted.
Aloha Banks Beaverton Boring Clackamas Cornelius Damascus Detroit Dundee Durham Fairview Forest Grove Gales Creek Gaston Gresham Happy Valley Hillsboro King City Lafayette Lake Oswego Mcminnville Multnomah Newberg Portland Rhododendron Sandy Sherwood Silverton Sunnyside Tigard Timber Troutdale Tualatin Vernonia Wilsonville Wood Village Those are all the areas where Frontier Fios TV is available according to this website http://www.fiberexperts.com/oregon-fios.html (no idea if that is up to date or not, and obviously doesn't mean all of Portland or such and such has it available).
Screw cable and satellite providers. I'd love to see the Blazers use Netflix and Amazon to stream their games on a subscription basis. About time sports get in tune with the direction entertainment is going.
I don't care if they make the deal with ComCast or other, as long as the Blazers "Require" the contract winner to put the channel on Dish and DirectV in the minimum channel package. The Wariors made this deal with ComCast, so we know it can be done. One of the channels I get on Dish is ComCast BayArea which carries the Warrior games. Next season I should get ComCast PDX or what ever handle it has.
Screw the streaming! Only the Cities have Internet fast enough to support streaming. The other 99% of the state does not.
