Recently, Time Warner Cable paid a combined $11
BILLION for rights to LA Lakers and Dodgers games – and starting next year, subscribers will forced to pay for four new channels showing those team’s games, whether they watch sports or not. But some residents of southern California are fighting back.
As reported on
Deadline: Hollywood, some California cable subscribers aren’t taking TWC’s extortion lying down. They have filed a class-action lawsuit seeking relief, stating that TWC’s bundling is a violation of the California Business & Professions Code. As the
lawsuit states, “According to the FCC and other studies, approximately 60% of the population are not sports enthusiasts, and left to their own would not subscribe to [to sports channels]…A very large segment of the consuming public is not sufficiently interested in [sports] to pay $50-$60 per year, but they have no way of unsubscribing from either the Lakers of Dodgers telecast, which together add about
$100 per year to the subscriber’s TWC bill.
"TWC’s bundling is unethical, oppressive, and unscrupulous. There is no practicable way consumers could avoid this injury…The ill-gotten revenues and profits make the TWC bundling practice unlawful and unfair under [the law].”
The entertainment cartel loves to claim that they are acting in subscribers’ best interests; but what does it say when their own customers have to take them to court just to be allowed freedom of choice?
