Perhaps your company will recognize the benefits of allowing employees to work virtually! Best wishes.
HD v. SD argument aside, how is this situation different from any other professional league's "league pass" set-up? If you have NFL Sunday Ticket, and the Bengals are one of the local games in your area, they're blacked out on NFL Sunday Ticket because you can get the game locally. The same thing happens with all the other subscriptions, not to mention times when the Reds are supposed to be on ESPN or MLB Network in non nationally-exclusive games (like ESPN Sunday Night Baseball).
Not sure if this is really an answer or not.... but I have DirecTV with the Sports Package. Part of that package is NESN which carries Boston Red Sox games (or it did) locally for the New England Market. I tried to watch a game my first year with DirecTV and the game was blacked out for me because I was out of market. They wanted me to buy the MLB package. Same thing with Hockey games. I know that's a little different, but thought I'd offer it up there. Mostly just so I could remind y'all that I'm still here..... and see my lovely Kung Fu Panda logo.
The difference is those channels you mentioned are available on multiple platforms (TW, Uverse, Comcast, streaming, etc). Our games are only on TW.
That is true. However, in Krypto's post, he said: "But yeah...if you had the combination of Time Warner (regardless of former Insight or not) with Direct Kick, that channel should not be blacked out..." I was merely pointing out that a locally-available game (in this case on Time Warner for a Time Warner subscriber) is typically not available on a "league pass" channel.
I would suspect both deals were somewhere in the vicinity of $0. I don't think The Crew makes much money if at all on these deals, ratings are too low to justify a channel paying more than the bare minimum required for the rights. That's why for the team it comes down to what the channel can offer as far as exposure.
then I wonder why we can't get out of the contract then. if we get nothing then let's get out. stick it on youtube.
at that point, all of the expenses would be footed by the Crew - cameras, video stream, production staff etc. I don't necessarily know if that is stuff footed by the company with partner with, but if that is the case, that could be a pretty restrictive cost maybe.
In addition to the production issues (someone here has mentioned before that TWC or FSN do produce the games) if you self produce and put it on YouTube you can kiss the sponsorships like Ohio Health goodbye. Need it to be on cable in some form to appease all of the companies that get airtime and pay The Crew money to do things like advertise on the score on the broadcast.
In the aftermath of announcing the deal, Mark McCullers said the Crew "invests significant money to put games on TV." I need to find the link and more detailed quote, but I remember him saying that or probably tweeting it in his ham-fisted defense of his deal.
An open letter to Crew fans regarding television partnership written by Mark McCullers on March 8, 2014
Oh yeah, I knew something like that was discussed by them before. Streaming online would lose a fair amount of revenue (and obviously eyeballs on the product considering most people would still rather watch on cable).
Likely means that the Crew doesn't get paid for the TV rights, so in effect it's an infomercial (they may get a discount, but I'm guessing that's how FSO looked at it and probably TWC too). Now I'm sure that the league requires the home team to provide tv feeds, so it is part of the cost of doing business.
Well obviously that is offset by the thousands we get from our partners that want their name splashed over tv screens that nobody even sees
I don't think it was implied that The Crew pays TWC to put the game on. As for revenue brought in from the broadcasts I would bet the majority is from MLS via the team's share of MLS Live, Direct Kick, and nationally televised matches. Obviously sponsorships are a small part of it.