All Viewers Pay to Keep TV Sports Fans Happy

“The eye-popping price tags have restarted debate about a topic near and dear to sports fans, fairness: many TV customers never watch the mightily expensive channels at all, yet almost all must pay. There was a shudder in the industry when John Malone, the business tycoon who helped create the modern-day cable system, said in November that ‘runaway sports rights’ costs amounted to ‘a high tax on a lot of households that don’t have a lot of interest in sports.’ The only short-term fix, he said, was government intervention.

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