Dodgers TV mess should be helped by Charter buying Time Warner Cable
Charter Communications has agreed to acquire Time Warner Cable for $55.33 billion, a mammoth move that has real-world ramifications outside of baseball. But since baseball is our biz here on The Stew, this news means one thing to us: the messy situation involving the Los Angeles Dodgers and Time Warner might finally get cleaned up.
Time Warner launched SportsNetLA in 2014, a cable network dedicated to the Dodgers, but other cable providers in the area haven’t picked it up, saying it’s too expensive. That has left about 70 percent of the L.A. area without access to SportsNetLA and, thus, without access to the Dodgers on TV.
One of the first orders of business for Charter CEO Tom Rutledge was to assure the people of L.A. that the Dodgers would be on more TVs soon, telling the Los Angeles Times:
“We are going to get the Dodgers on,” Charter Communications Chief Executive Tom Rutledge said Tuesday morning in an interview with the L.A. Times. “We want the Dodgers on every outlet and we are committed to making that happen,” Rutledge said.
Charter reaches 300,000 subscribers in the L.A. region and they should have SportsNetLA within a few weeks, the Times reports. That’s one provider down, but the bigger question is whether Charter will end the standoff between Time Warner and other major cable companies such as DirecTV, AT&T, Cox Communications and Dish Network. The other providers balked at Time Warner’s cost for the channel, and Time Warner wouldn’t budge, which put the two sides at an impasse since the start of the 2014 season.
From the sound of things, there’s reason for Dodgers fans to optimistic. You don’t tell the biggest newspaper in L.A. “We want the Dodgers on every outlet” if you’re going to continue the previous regime’s tactics that have frustrated fans for the past year.
We should note, though, Dodgers fans thought relief was coming once before too. There was a deal in place for Comcast to buy Time Warner, but that fell apart in April. For the sake of fans in L.A., who deserve to hear Vin Scully calling ballgames, here’s hoping this gets baseball back on their TVs.
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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz
