No Live Football means none of this matters.
Exactly. They can have all the channels in the world, but if you don't have sports, you still need cable
Why are you blaming apple for this. It's the NFL and directv.
All I can say is "been there; done that, feel my 21-year old pain."
One of the problems that no-one seems to really tackle is the assumption that people only like or watch sports local to the area/country which they reside. That isn't truly the case. For the past 20 years, I've been one of the very few people who have paid for the extremely limited coverage of the Australian Football League (Australian Rules football) and rugby that channels like ESPN, Prime Sports, and when coverage started to get better, the channels opted to throw it up higher, to their digital tiers, and charging more on top of what they already charged to get it.
So complaining about NFL? MLB? Like I said, feel my pain.
What makes you think the networks want to encourage cord cutting? The "pay tv" providers are a huge source of income for the OTA networks via retransmission fees. They aren't going to make it easy to get their content for $0 and if they made it available for a fee it wouldn't be cheap (relatively speaking). Probably $5-7 per network per month. Kinda makes it pointless.
As for FS1 that is a pay tv only channel so what did you expect?
However, it does bring up a point. Providers, let alone Apple is missing a huge potential revenue stream by pigeonholing themselves into whatever is localized for the customer's region, and not expanding globally. Yes, they may think that they can get more money
en masse because more will purchase content local to them (because that's what they know), but if they were able to take, say, Bundesliga or one of the European soccer leagues, throw it over Apple TV to someone in Brazil, or Mexico; or Rugby or bowling or basketball and deliver it to other countries
without having to go through a cable channel like ESPN, Fox, etc., paying the cable tax on top of the content price, they'd truly have a serious revenue stream coming from all parts of the world, while increasing the cord-cutting that is already happening.
BL.
