I'm not sure what that means. What is an "altitude viewer"? Just anyone that has ever watched altitude in the past, ever? If I'm hanging on it, it's because it's important to the calculation of what is being discussed. I think you are making an assumption here. Comcast isn't going out of their way to clarify this.
WTF do you mean "what is an 'altitude viewer'?" Is that a joke question? The statement is rather clear, in my opinion and it can be summarized as such: "Altitude vieweing numbers = dog s**t"
Again, we are just making assumptions without numbers. Sure, they may have more in the way of programming. They may also charge more. They may also collude with each other because it's in house owned. You don't find it funny that the odd man out in Dish is the one that seems to have the largest number of RSN disputes?
We
have the numbers, you keep getting hung up on the use of the word "subscriber" or asking "what is an 'Altitude viewer'?" We do not currently have "Well Altitude had this many total viewers during the last year..." data, but when it's not being disputed that 95% of people who have access to watch Altitude tuned in to
less than 1 game a week, then I'm not sure we need more data to come to the aforementioned conclusion
I'm not sure what you mean by "the Nuggets aren't very good either?" I assume you mean viewership and not performance?
I mean that the Nuggets have largely, for the last 15 years Altitude has been in existence, a dog-shit franchise. They have been bad, not so bad as to draft in the top-3/5 of the draft, but just bad. From there if you have a bad team it's not going to be surprising if your viewing audience is low. But no, I do not have any numbers to back that up, other than lumping them in with the total Altitude viewership which has been purported to be abysmal.
I don't think anyone is arguing that they have a strong negotiating stance. The strength of their stance doesn't factor into what is an obvious colluded attempt to sink them though. They have no choice but to appeal to customers desire for their product (at least at this stage of the game).
The do have a choice though--accepting that they're not going to make out like bandits like they have for the last 15 years. I don't think they should be forced into accepting a 50-70% reduction, but I do believe they need to accept that they're going to see
a reduction.
I disagree here. The big 3 know that they can live without altitude, and that altitude cannot live without them. They are leveraging this in a scorched earth campaign to make altitude lose WAY more than they do. In the long run, it will benefit them. All parties here are guilty of not giving one **** of who is caught in the crossfire though.
If the "big 3" know they can live without Altitude then why isn't more pressure being exerted onto KSE for acknowledging that they have a business that is no longer sustainable?
At the end of the day, the big 3 will be the winners here. They can still charge customers for this, and not pay a cent back to altitude, and eventually the cost for these sports programs will likely get folded into their own networks so they can milk every last dollar out of them.
Cable and Satellite companies are clinging to an archaic model. The more customers they lose to cord-cutting, the more they're going to squeeze the existing ones until there's nothing left to squeeze. And I believe that day is coming faster than they will admit. I do not consider them winners here, not in the slightest. There are ways to watch the games. It may not be considered ethical (or legal), but there are ways. Aside from that, it's not the "big 3"'s fault that Altitude is (seemingly) no longer a sustainable business (which I say considering they absolutely
need these contracts to keep themselves going, and I would not be surprised if they're still running at a net loss on Stan's bottom line).
Kroenke may be a devil here, but IMO he's the lesser of them.
Not a chance in hell that either side can claim a "lesser of two evils" title at this point. They both suck, one just has a better negotiating position and would normally be able to wait out the other side...only the other side has Wal-Mart money that can be thrown towards this bad investment.