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Comment by heyheyhey | Hacker News Reader

> Sports salaries should be 1/10th of what they currently are.

So where should that 9/10 go?

If the major expense of your business is the salaries of your employees, and your number of employees need to remain relatively unchanged, and your revenue drops in 1/10th, then roughly you will need to higher employees who will accept 1/10th of the wages. Some of your current employees may accept, but you can expect massive turn-over. And arguably lower-quality employees.

In short, I'm being forced to pay for live sports, if I want cable, and I predict that very soon that will change.

I'll bet you any amount that you care to wager that the salaries for NBA/NFL/MLB players don't drop by anything close to 90% at any point in the next 10 years.

No try, major league sports athlete who is trying to mitigate his losses! ;-)

If taxes stopped supporting sports, and if cable / satellite customers didn't have to subsidize sports, something would have to give.

Are you just saying those things are impossible, or are you saying I'm overstating what the outcome would be?

I don't think your judgement about the degree to which cable customers subsidize sports is anywhere near correct.

> Needham & Co. estimates that ESPN rakes in $7 billion from cable customers, even though many never even watch the channel.

http://www.npr.org/2013/08/07/209820647/the-history-and-futu...

> Threatened by Internet streaming services and a fragmenting TV audience, Comcast/NBC, ESPN, Fox Sports, Turner, and CBS have agreed over the last 20 months to spend $72 billion for the TV rights to professional, Olympic, and college sports well into the next decade.

http://articles.philly.com/2012-11-19/news/35187681_1_sports...

> In some TV markets, Abdoulah said, sports channels account for 60 percent of the overall programming costs in the cable-TV bill because of fees for regional sports networks.

Yes, cable is not a la carte. That doesn't automatically mean that you're subsidizing ESPN. Maybe it's the people that sign up for cable solely to get ESPN that are subsidizing all the other channels.

You are correct that mathematically, I have not proven the direction of total subsidization.

However:

> In some TV markets, Abdoulah said, sports channels account for 60 percent of the overall programming costs in the cable-TV bill because of fees for regional sports networks.

I guarantee that it is not the case that greater than 60 percent of people who sign up for cable do so solely to watch sports. So, in certain markets, it is for sure people like me who subsidize sports programming, not the other way around.

Generally I start from the point of view that gross mis-pricings where there are multiple buyers and sellers involved are pretty rare. So the various TV organizations are probably paying about as much for sports broadcasting rights as their customers are willing to pay for them. Maybe it's off a bit one way or the other but certainly not by a factor of 10 (as you claimed above).

That's basically what I think unless I'm presented with very strong evidence to the contrary.

Remember, cable is merely the carrier. I assert that $0 of what I pay my cable company should go to pay for programming (other than Pay-Per-View), considering that programming already has advertising. If I want to pay for Premium content (like HBO, Sports), then Cable could mediate that. But that's not the relationship we have today, at all.

Cable companies are certainly not just a carrier. They pay all kinds of money in order to put together a package of programming that is popular enough for them to attract a large subscriber base. They do this because that's how they think they can best run their business.

You can assert all you want about how you think the cable company should spend it's money, but you don't get all that much of a say in the matter.

Me alone? Nope. People recognizing how awful cable is? You tell me:

Time Warner bled 191,000 subscribers in one quarter.

DirectTV lost 84,000.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/business/media/directv-and...

Teachers, to start.

That's a silly answer for a lot of reasons. But more than any it doesn't make much of a difference.

The NFL will spend about 3.8B on salaries next year. The NBA is around 2B. MLB is around 3.2B. Add that up and you get 9B. Spread that evenly among the 7.2 Million teachers in the US and you get: only 1,250 each.

The average high school teacher in the US makes about $44k a year.

A 2.8% raise is nothing to scoff at.

Also, I think you're vastly underestimating, based on all of the support staff necessary to make a sporting facility, man it, broadcast it, and comment on it.

Not to mention how much the team owners take out of it.

Well we were just talking about salaries for the players which is why I only quoted those numbers. I think that most of the sports union contracts stipulate that players get around 50% of gross revenues so you can double things if you want to go that route.

A 5.6% raise is not nothing. ;-)

Oh ya, it's definitely not nothing.

But it's not the huge windfall I think that OP implied. It's not "if we didn't spend so much money on sports we could fix all these problems we have in our education system" money.

Sports merchandising. Travel to sporting events.

I overall think it would hurt the economy (not "help education,") but you're still massively understating the money spent on sports.

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