Let the games begin: Sports dull cord cutters' scissors

Sports fans and cord cutters can't be mutually exclusive. If you love sports, you're less likely to cut the cord that ties you to your favorite team's TV experience, a survey of 1,200 multichannel TV subscribers found.

As detailed in Ars Technica, 93.5 percent of households surveyed by BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield watch football and 68.4 percent watch baseball, making sports a major reason to keep cable TV. "While we are concerned about the long-term potential of 'over-the-top' video, we simply do not view it as a major threat to the cable and satellite industries over the next three-five years," Greenfield wrote in the report.

On the other hand, cable and other service providers are a threat to over-the-air sports, according to a piece in DTV USA Forum which opines "some folks fear that big ticket sports programs may be moving away from over-the-air television to pay TV networks." The story goes further and says that the Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA)-NBC Universal deal does "nothing to calm those fears" because only a last-hour agreement mandated that the new media giant continue showing over the air sporting events like the Kentucky Derby and Sunday Night Football.

Has anyone noticed that the revered Monday Night Football, long a fixture on ABC's broadcast networks, has been on ESPN for a while now?

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