There could be a serious family squabble in the offing. I might not have mentioned it in the past but the wife is the sports fan in this family. Not that I ever object to cold beer and a Blue Jays game on a warm summer afternoon but I am no fanatic.
And we are Torontonians and devotion to the Maple Leaf hockey team is in both our gene pools. Even living here in Barrie, we are ‘at home’ with all the other Leaf fans.
What is concerning me lately is the increasing mumbling across the breakfast table as the wife scans the statistics for all the Toronto teams each morning. I have explained endlessly that the paper was probably printed before she went to bed the night before. She is gradually getting the idea that it pays to check with the Internet.
But what is troubling me is the growing number of teams in contention for fan attention. There are the rambunctious Raptors, the fabulous FC and the traditional Toronto Argos already out there making Toronto famous at the same time as our hockey club has once again made it to the early stages of the Stanley Cup.
What I will not agree to in this cornucopia of sports is to support the greed of the broadcasting tsars. To be fair though, I am looking forward to the CBC continuing its tradition of bringing us Hockey Night in Canada. That was a smart decision.
But I was absolutely amazed when I saw the proposed monthly charges to the consumer to stream those hockey broadcasts through the Internet. With the costs of Internet service, with sufficient bandwidth for streaming video, constantly climbing, who can afford to watch sports.
There will be other households across the country that are going to have serious discussions about how to pay for all the specialty channels that people want to watch.
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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