It’s been 32 years since Bruce Springsteen lamented he had “57 channels and nothin' on.” Now we have hundreds of channels and the same problem. But if we want access to live TV, our cheapest options are streamers like Philo and Sling TV, and even with those, we’re paying for dozens of channels we don’t watch. Why?

The reason is a “deal with the devil” that shifts the burden of the expensive channels to every TV subscriber, whether they watch them or not.

Friday's court ruling against Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery reveals that “on average, sports networks cost $1.30 per subscriber per month for distributors to license, while non-sports networks cost only an average of $0.71 per subscriber per month.”

That split is why Philo only costs $28 / month. It sidesteps the expensive sports channels entirely.

If a distributor wants to carry ESPN, it needs to pay $9.42 every month per subscriber. For the hard-to-find regional sports networks, carriers have to pay $3.50-$8.50. Those prices make TNT seem like a bargain at $3.00 — but that price may be too high moving forward without the NBA.

Cable and streaming channel packages may seem like a reasonable bargain because the cost of these channels is spread to every subscriber. Your grandma who only wants to watch “Andy Griffith” reruns is paying just as much as you are for ESPN. If Grandma ever found out she could watch Andy on Paramount+ for $7.99, the entire financial structure of pay TV would collapse.

Live sports are the crown jewel of linear TV. The court documents confirm: “In 2023, 96 of the 100 most watched telecasts across the pay TV ecosystem were live sports events.”

This sets up an arms race to the death as media companies must pay more and more for sports rights, passing along the burden to audiences. We’ve seen some NBA and NHL teams choose a bigger audience over higher carriage fees. The Suns, Jazz, and Pelicans bailed on their deals with Bally to put their games free over-the-air. The Golden Knights and Florida Panthers have done the same. But when it comes to the national TV packages, the teams have no say when and where the games air.

Disney CEO Bob Iger shot himself in the foot in 2016, as the court spotlighted this quote: “[Y]ou cannot launch a new multichannel platform – a platform or bundle, whether it is, by the way, 30 channels or whether it is 150 channels, you can’t do it successfully without ESPN.”

That quote sounds awfully close to, “Nice TV package you have there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

That attitude informed the judge’s ruling, and it killed Venu Sports… at least for now.