By Dan Shaughnessy, Globe columnist | January 29, 2006
It was an announcement that barely got anyone's attention. A couple of weeks back, the Red Sox and NESN declared the end of their Friday night relationship with Channel 38, committing all locally televised Red Sox games to pay cable.
This means no free television access to the Red Sox in 2006, except for a handful of games that will be carried nationally on the Fox network.
For the last three years, people without cable in this market have been able to watch the Red Sox on Channel 38 on Friday nights. Twenty-eight games per year. For free. Now if you don't have cable, you don't have the Red Sox -- except for that random Fox game once a month.
It's unfortunate. It's also elitist, classist, and probably greedy, too. The Sox are putting all their games on NESN because it means more money for the organization. Unfortunately, it takes the team away from some loyal fans who don't have the cash for cable.
We tend to think we live in a world in which everybody has cable television and personal computer access. Well, it's not everybody. In the Boston market, 6-7 percent of homes do not have cable television. The majority of those households make less than $50,000 per year.
Folks without cable? You know who they are. Probably your elderly aunt in Cohasset, the one who still has a rotary phone. She loves the Red Sox. Recently, she's loved them on Friday nights when she can watch for free. It's the same in a lot of hospitals, shelters, and religious residences. Not everybody has cable.
According to Scarborough Research, there are 589,635 adults in the Boston market (Eastern Massachusetts from the Cape to Southern New Hampshire and as far west as Worcester) without cable or satellite television. More than 20 percent of the non-cable population is nonwhite and 51.8 percent is made up of households earning less than $50,000. Nineteen percent of the non-cable/satellite people are over
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