Our family went to Winnipeg for the weekend to meet our brand new nephew. The trip takes five hours from Yorkton, so sometimes you have to get creative when it comes to entertainment. I travel a lot, so I’m used to it.
Podcasts are, generally, how I make the time fly. Friday night, I listened to Bob McCown’s Primetime Sports and, often, I find the first hour of the show (which is not available on television) is the most entertaining. Twice a week, he takes phone calls and he didn’t mince words about his own employer when a number of individuals took liberties with the decision by Rogers to move a great number of the Blue Jay broadcasts to Sportsnet One, even though the majority of the country cannot access the station through local cable providers (Rogers is also the only cable provider offering Sportsnet One to its customers).
In fact, McCown publicly rebutted a Rogers/Sportsnet response to a customer who expressed disappointment at the move. “They are accurate in saying your cable company has the option of putting the free preview on, but the reality is that until there is a hard deal in place to carry the channel when it’s available on a pay basis, they aren’t going to offer the free preview. I’m not saying there isn’t a cable compay giving the free preview right now, but I’ll guess there isn’t a single one. If you aren’t offering the channel, you aren’t putting the free preview up. So that’s a BS way of putting the onus on the cable companies. Number two, Sportsnet cut a deal with TSN so that Sunday Night Baseball would get moved to TSN and the 25 games TSN was going to carry of the Blue Jays was moved to Sportsnet. I don’t recall an announcement at that time that said those 25 games would go to Sportsnet One; but rather that Sportsnet was going to have all the Blue Jay games. At the time there was no Sportsnet One. So, a decision was clearly made that after August 14th, most Blue Jay games would go to Sportsnet One because they want to sell you Sportsnet One. It has nothing to do with putting it on free. This has everything to do with ‘the hook’. So, at the very least, this response is misleading and misrepresentative.”
He didn’t stop there. “I understand business. I get what they are doing, but this is bad business, bad public relations, and a bad idea. If I’m Rogers I fix this idea right now. By next week, let’s put those games back on one of the other four channels and put it on Sportsnet One as well. You can’t suck it off all four regional channels and just put it on this channel. It’s just wrong. I am imploring Rogers to undo this mess. At the very least, put the 25 games that are scheduled to be only on Sportsnet One, on one of the other channels. That’s the basic minimum you can do. This is bad marketing for Sportsnet, Rogers, and the Toronto Blue Jays (Jays are also owned by Rogers). There is nothing good that can come from this. The passion from the people is clear. If you thought there was no passion left for Blue Jay baseball in this country, you have been advised. People are mad.”
My own opinion surrounds the CRTC and whether they can step in. McCown has a message for them too. “To the boneheads at the CRTC, it is time for the people to be allowed to choose what they want to watch and don’t want to watch. I’m tired of bundles of channels I have no interest in. This system is broken. I’m tired the entire population of Canada has to prop up channels that no one is the least bit interested in. There is so much unwatchable crap on Canadian television today and the only reason it’s still on there is because they get a piece of subscriber fees that none of us want to pay, but they are buried in there for packages of other channels. This is 2010. Let us choose what we want to watch and the channels that nobody wants to watch will disappear and no one will care.”
Kind of my thoughts when we worked at CKX
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