The furor among Blue Jay's fans continues to build. The mainstream media, the sports media specialists, the comments on the fan forums show that Rogers is in for fight. They must be losing huge money from advertising revenue as their audience is down 94% according to BBM Canada Audience figures. Only 31,000 Canadians watched the Toronto Blue Jays play the Los Angeles Angels on Rogers' SportsNet One television station this past weekend. That number was 94% lower than the more than 480,000 Canadians who tuned into the Jays versus Angels games on existing Sportsnet regional stations on Friday and Sunday.The Mud Report comes from coastal BC and, like two-thirds of Canada, can't access Sportsnet One even if we wanted to [which we don't]. i watched the ads Rogers ran on the original 4 Sportsnet regional channels this spring. They promised they'd be carrying ALL the Jays games on those Sportsnet stations, they lied.
Rogers arrogance is, unfortunately, common among vertical integration-monopoly capitialists. Capitialists and their corporate henchmen fulminate endlessly about the wonders of competition but the real adgenda is to control every aspect of everything thereby eliminating all competition so they can gorge on the fruits of their monopoly. Rogers owns the Blue Jays, it owns the stadium, it sells the broadcast rights to itself [Rogers' Sportsnet], on its broadcasts it runs ads for its various products including the lies about carrying ALL of this season's Blue Jay games. Rogers are greedy bastards, they believe they can wring a few more bucks outta us but they're gamble is backfiring.
At the moment only Rogers cable subscribers have the option of buying into Sportnet One and they aren't in droves. The rest of us can and certainly should bitch loud and often on the forums linked below or take whatever proactive action we can to get Rogers braintrust to acknowledge their huge error, to apologize to Blue Jays fans for this error and to promise they'll dump to idiot who's idea it was. Every day Rogers is losing big bucks on ad revenue already, as time goes on they'll sell less and less Jays' merchandise, the already terrible home game attendence will get worse, the spin-off of businesses and jobs around Toronto will dwindle and with less revenues the Blue Jays will suffer and so will we the Blue Jays' fans.
FORUMS and Comments:
Jays fans feeling betrayed by Sportsnet
Jays on Sportsnet One
Pawns in a game of chicken
Jays audience on SportsNet One down 94%
