Rudy Pemberton said:
$7 to watch one NBA game? One that would presumably not be on national TV? I'm skeptical they will find much of a market for this.
They don't want to find much of a market for this. All they need it to be is incremental revenue for minimal effort without undercutting League Pass or the national partners. Say they do a really modest number like 5000 buys a night - which would be less than 1% of a typical UFC PPV, for example. That would be $5-6m a season in basically found money. Not a huge market but $5m isn't bad for almost no work and no damage to existing relationships.
I could see myself using this. I'm from New Orleans and I like watching Anthony Davis but I'm just not home enough or interested enough to buy League Pass, but I can certainly see there being <7 nights a season that I'm home and there's nothing better on and I buy a single game.
The pricing is a useful window into the reality of unbundling / a la carte. The price of a single game is close to 6x what you would pay on a per night basis for League Pass (~$1.25/night). That's what a la carte cable would look like. You can have what you want, but you're going to pay multiples more than what you would pay for it as part of a bundle.
MLB seems like a more likely next market for this than the NFL. Tons of games, mostly coming from RSNs, and maybe they could offer it at a little bit lower price. Think there are some logical markets for an MLB a la carte offering: Boston fans who would only buy Sox-Yankees games, Dodgers fans who would only buy Kershaw starts, fans who only really get interested at the end of September.
Seems like a smart offering to me overall.