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On the fifth day of the Sunday Ticket trial, the plaintiffs started to show the financial costs of the league’s alleged (and accepted, by the jury) antitrust violation.
They called to the stand Dr. Daniel Rascher, a professor who teaches courses in sports economics, sports finance, and applied research methods at the University of San Francisco. Rascher ultimately introduced the notion that the price gouging for Sunday Ticket cost the commercial and residential class members a total of $7 billion.
His number came from an attempt to envision a world in which the NFL’s teams sold their out-of-market rights to the networks that don’t have in-market packages. That could have, in Rascher’s opinion, created a college football-style situation on Sundays, with a bunch of games on the various major broadcast and cable networks on every given Sunday.
So, instead of having only the hand-picked 1:00 p.m. ET games on CBS and/or Fox based on the geography of a given market, fans in that locale would also have, for instance, an out-of-market game on NBC, ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, FS1, USA, TNT, TBS, etc., etc., etc.
In that alternate universe without antitrust violations, it would have cost consumers with pre-existing access to those networks nothing to watch the games.
The $7 billion comes only from the cost of Sunday Ticket. It does not include, for instance, the expense of getting DirecTV or of having a sufficient DirecTV subscription to qualify for Sunday Ticket. It was simply the extra cost of Sunday Ticket versus the no-extra-cost world of every Sunday afternoon game available somewhere on the non-premium dial.
Like plenty of other witnesses in the case, Rascher’s testimony was much longer than it needed to be (more on that in a later post). Rascher testified for all of the fifth day of the trial (June 11) and into the sixth (June 12). There were some interesting nuggets beyond his main purpose of establishing the $7 billion damages ceiling.
Pointing to internal NFL research, Rascher…
Source link : https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sunday-ticket-trial-day-5-131826387.html
Author : ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports
Publish date : 2024-07-22 13:18:26
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