What do you do about espn and other sports channels?
You mostly live without or you try to get the sports you want to see through a hodge-podge of other sources. Inevitably, the quality will be at least a notch down, sometimes for both picture & sound. It's not just ESPN. TNT has some great sports too. Regional Sport Networks often have all of the home town teams. Most of that is not available as a stream, or- if it is- it's a lower quality video and/or audio signal than you can get by paying the money.
I think the biggest downside to the cut-the-cord crusade is in new show discoveries. Those rationalizing just buying the shows they like, etc can't know if they like a brand new show before they buy it. I perceive great threat to the established model of many pilots coming to market every year and the chance for each of them to find their audience within the bundle of a satt/cable subscription. In the general dream of this new model, we only buy the shows we like (so how can we like a show before we see it so it gets the funding it needs to actually last beyond the pilot stage?). Classic, much-loved shows like- say- Seinfeld took a whole year+ to find their audience. I'm not thinking Seinfeld would be able to sustain long enough in the cord-cutter dream to survive that long.
As is, yes, there's a lot of channels we pay for that we never watch but some of the glut of profit in that is what makes up the incentives for the artists to take the great financial risk to try to turn the concept of a new show into a show that we'll eventually like. In the dream, we kill off much of that incentive. I perceive if the dream takes hold with the masses, shows are going to need some kind of kickstarter-like model to try to get their funding. I foresee much fewer new shows getting backed. I foresee much more reality TV because it's relatively cheap(er) and thus lower risk having the best chances, and more expensive (more professional) shows never getting their backing because they require an expensive buy before you even get to see the show in this model.
Similarly, the dream usually includes wanting to be rid of those annoying commercials, ignoring the fact that commercials also represent other people throwing a lot of money into this machine to subsidize the overall machine. That's commercials running on the few channels "we" watch and commercials running on those hundreds of channels "we" never watch. All of that is somebody else paying money into the machine to help make it go. The dream is often to kill that. It's huge money to just kill off yet expect the stream of old and new shows to keep right on coming.
The last leg of the dream is the concept of paying for just what we actually want should cost a fraction of what we pay now. For example 200 channels for $100 per month. I watch 10 channels. $100/200 = 50 cents per channel. My revised bill in the new model should be $5 for the 10 channels I actually want. Oh, I want them commercial-free. And I still want all the Studios on the other end to keep cranking out pilots so that there will be new shows in the future for me to love even though the average revenue flow from each consumer is cut 80%, 90% or more and the OPM revenues from all those commercials are also eliminated.
What's never laid out in the dream is how we pay a fraction of the cable bill, get all of our current favorites, motivate the Studios to keep trying to deliver future favorites, without commercial-driven subsidies. It's easy to see what appears to be in it for us and it's easy to fantasize about how much better such a model would be for us. But I can't figure out how the names in the credits at the end of all of our favorite shows continue to get paid what they get paid and why the entrepreneurs who take great personal risk to try to deliver us new favorite shows will want to continue taking an already huge gamble when the odds of success are amped up so much higher in this new model. In other words, we seem to dismiss the realities of what happens when established cash flows get that kind of hair cut, instead- apparently- just assuming that lots of new pilots will continue to show up every year, we'll get some free crack at them for a while so we can see if we like them or not and so on.
I hate the big cable bill as much as the next guy. But the dream is a red herring if the masses try to move that way. I guess there's a reason that future sci-fi visions never seem to show anyone watching television. It all gets killed off when the masses had this dream fulfilled. All that remains is the old shows already in the can by the point in time when the machine is finally broken by the dream coming true. Cue the crew gathering in the staging area so that Data, Beverly and others can act out some play. Maybe that's the best that's available then (volunteers paid nothing to put on a live show in their spare time).
TV and similar and we still have a Netflix subscription too but nothing touches OTA plus one of the Satt services if live sports and certain other programming (hard to find or not available via cord-cutter options) are desirable... especially if one cares about maximizing picture & sound.
