Mialulu
Member
Anyone actually read their July DIRECTV bill line by line? The regional sports network fee used to sit at $3.99 for most eligible packages. It's now a range, topping out at $23.99 in some markets, with the average landing near $15. It took effect at the end of June, so July and August statements are the first ones carrying it.
For someone who was paying $3.99, that's about $11 more a month for exactly the same channels. Call it $130 a year, and north of $280 where the fee hits the top of the range. Nothing in the package changed. No new games, no new networks, just a bigger number on a line most people never picked in the first place.
The mechanism isn't mysterious. Rights fees keep climbing, the RSNs lost the subscriber base that used to pay for them, and they have been leaning on distributors for higher carriage money to stay solvent. DIRECTV passed it through. What bugs me is the framing. An average of $15 sounds tame until you notice the average is doing the work of hiding the markets where this thing more than quintupled.
The part worth knowing is that DIRECTV does sell base packages with no regional sports at all, so the fee is avoidable if your team isn't on an RSN or you can live on national broadcasts. That option doesn't get advertised anywhere near as hard as the sports tiers do.
So what does yours actually say? I want to know whether the $23.99 end is real for anyone here or whether most of us landed near the middle.
For someone who was paying $3.99, that's about $11 more a month for exactly the same channels. Call it $130 a year, and north of $280 where the fee hits the top of the range. Nothing in the package changed. No new games, no new networks, just a bigger number on a line most people never picked in the first place.
The mechanism isn't mysterious. Rights fees keep climbing, the RSNs lost the subscriber base that used to pay for them, and they have been leaning on distributors for higher carriage money to stay solvent. DIRECTV passed it through. What bugs me is the framing. An average of $15 sounds tame until you notice the average is doing the work of hiding the markets where this thing more than quintupled.
The part worth knowing is that DIRECTV does sell base packages with no regional sports at all, so the fee is avoidable if your team isn't on an RSN or you can live on national broadcasts. That option doesn't get advertised anywhere near as hard as the sports tiers do.
So what does yours actually say? I want to know whether the $23.99 end is real for anyone here or whether most of us landed near the middle.
