Breaking this post into more manageable replies:
I do agree that in a sense it's a little more complicated than just cable companies unilaterally screwing people over. My understanding is that the blackout policy begins with the league, which wants to force people into either buying a ticket or paying for media rights to its broadcast. To force the consumer's hand, the league negotiates blackouts as part of their exclusive contract with the regional TV network. In turn, the network works the logistics of that agreement into their exclusive contract with cable providers.
The "blackout" policy is a bit different than that. Each team in the league is given a home-market territory, negotiated by each team and the league. So when Vegas started up, Vegas and the League carved out the home territory for the Golden Knights. Conversely, when the Thrashers ended up in Winnipeg the League and the new Jets created the home market for Winnipeg, and adjusted the home markets of the Nashville Predators and the Carolina Hurricanes to include the area vacated by the Thrashers.
It is at that point that a given team contracts with a local broadcasting outlet to provide games. And the given team has the right - as well as the local broadcaster - to be the exclusive carrier of said games within the territory.
The issue that people are having is that this would all be fine if the cable providers were providing an a la carte option for access to that channel. A lot of people would be absolutely 100% OK with paying $10-$20 a month for a single channel, or even a small package of channels, so that they could access that exclusive broadcast. There is a huge market for this.
But what if the MVPD's, the cable and satellite providers cannot make that offer? It's the next point...
But, knowing that they have entire sports fanbases up against a wall, cable companies refuse to offer that product. Instead, they take the sports product and roll it into a huge package of channels -- many of them useless QVC-style garbage -- and give the consumer no option but to go that route. And they double down on that by structuring the bundles so that the consumer is given little option but to also use the cable company for internet access as well. As a result, the consumer who simply wanted to watch one show is now using the cable company for virtually all of their digital media. And there's no way out of the trap, unless you're willing to either stop watching your favorite team... or to watch pirated content.
One of the two major satellite providers, Dish, is now in a dispute with the regional Fox Sports Networks. The 21 Regional Sports Networks have been off Dish for three weeks. One of the reasons is that Dish wants to move the Fox Sports Networks out of some of their packages. The Fox Sports Networks do not want this.
It's easier to blame the cable and satellite company for the packaging of channels when the channels are the parties trying to dictate what package their channels should be placed.
Needless to say, this arrangement never favors the consumer. It is anti-competitive, artificially inflates sales for worthless content, and forces consumers to spend their money inefficiently for a low-quality product. The sheer market-inappropriateness of this model is being brought to the surface by cable companies getting absolutely killed as soon as people had the option to directly stream other services, including pirated products but also including legitimate products which were both higher quality AND lower cost than a cable package. By all rights cable companies should be dead already... they're hanging on by squeezing their remaining customer base into a particularly exploitative model.
No, it's more like what I'll call the Wild-Wild-West syndrome. Cablers had a monopoly until the launch of DirecTV in the mid-1990's, and Dish came along a little later. Those satcasters went from 0 customers in 1993 to over 25 million combined not 20 years later. That was the wild-wild-west of competition.
Cablers then started their bundling of internet, phone and programming services in the mid-200's. That allowed cablers an advantage over the satcasting services, who could not provide phone nor internet. That stemmed some of the losses the cablers had been taking on since competition with the satcasters.
Now it's streaming that's the wild-wild-west. I personally believe that in the long run the streaming of services will degrade the quality of programming due to losses in revenues from existing programmers and at some point there will be about four or five major players in streaming and most people will need two or three services in order to get what they want, paying more than what the standard cable bundle would be.
The services from the MVPD's will evolve, just like newspapers, radio, television, cable and now internet streaming will.
I have little faith in a positive outcome, but one can always hope. It's very clear that the entire system, from the sports league to the local franchise to the TV network to the cable company, all operates as a quasi-monopoly, which is what led us to this place.
The NHL was involved in a similar lawsuit about six years ago. You do have a point - the positive outcome from that was a single-team only option for Center Ice became available, but it still didn't address the issue when that team plays a game in your home market, as you'd be forced to watch the local broadcast instead of the Center Ice broadcast, aka the dreaded "blackout".
