Vacation be damned, I’m making time to trudge through the 2,506-page Sunday Ticket trial transcript. And I’ll be posting items regarding specific portions of the testimony and other developments of interest.
Many of the witnesses testified through prerecorded depositions. Unfortunately, none were included in the official transcript. (Then again, that probably kept it from being 4,000 pages long.) After former NFL Media chief Steve Bornstein testified over the second and third day of the trial, various depositions were played — including one given by Patriots owner Robert Kraft and one by NFL Media executive Hans Schroeder.
Next came, live in court, one of the named plaintiffs in the case. A New Orleans native who moved to California, Robert Lippincott purchased Sunday Ticket to watch Saints games.
Lippincott easily established some of the key, but also obvious, facts of the case. He said he would have bought a package that included only Saints games, but that wasn’t available. He said he had to purchase a DirecTV subscription along with Sunday Ticket.
And he was willing to do it because it was important for him to watch the Saints.
“It matters to me,” he said. “You know, life’s hard. And they’re my every Sunday, no matter what, like I said, win or lose, there’s pleasure, there’s joy. You know, you laugh, you cry. That’s the best thing about football.”
And that’s the kind of passion that the NFL tapped into when overpricing Sunday Ticket. The most avid fans are the ones who got screwed, because those who didn’t have the same passion simply didn’t buy the package.
That was the sweet spot the NFL hoped to engineer. Charge enough so that only the most ardent fans will find a way to pay for it, even though they shouldn’t have had to pay that much because the NFL (as the jury determined) violated antitrust laws by working together to jack up the price so that more fans would watch the games on local CBS and Fox affiliates, keeping the ratings of the traditional networks…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/sunday-ticket-trial-day-three-155355470.html
Author : ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports
Publish date : 2024-07-16 15:53:55
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