📡 Cable TV is dead. That's why the next round of college football realignment could look like NFL

[BAMANEWSBOT]

The NBA playoffs ended. We remain months away from college football beginning. It’s the optimal time to take stock and discuss some college football realignment. The last round resolved little of the underlying tension, bloated conferences and sacrificed rivalries at the altar of cable television footprint. Another round during the next decade could be even more drastic with a changed television landscape.

Cable is not dying. It’s dead. The cable box might as well be the landline phone. Technology has made it redundant. Cable subscribers are leaving in a steady trickle. The only finger still plugging the dike is Internet infrastructure. Many rely on a cable provider for home Internet service. Getting out of a long-term bundle is more effort than its worth. When Fiber Internet or something else expands capacity, the trickle of cord-cutters will become a flood.

That spells trouble for college football. College football depends on cable. Conference networks draw cable subscriber carriage fees. ESPN and FOX pay for conference rights with revenue from cable subscriber carriage fees. That huge pot of postseason money? It comes from cable subscriber carriage fees.

What comes next? The focus will shift from no longer relevant cable footprint to attracting an audience. The money pot will be smaller.

ESPN won’t be drawing from a bottomless Scrooge McDuck vault. It will have less money to spend. Silicon Valley execs might ride in on gleaming white Teslas to replace ESPN and FOX (or partner with them). Google or Amazon getting into the college football business could make sense. That does not mean they will preserve the present format intact.

Cable TV is dead. That’s why the next round of college football realignment could look more like the NFL

 

[RollTyd98]

When you can watch live shows on these cord cutter devices and not some "on demand" version of past preselected programs, cable and satellite will still be the most viable option. Sure you pay less but also you get what you pay for. Sure you get the history channel but you only get a small portion of it. Good luck if it's not about buying storage lockers with your pawn shop money gained by selling picked items from someone's hoarded garage clean out.