Dish Network Drops Fox Sports and MSG Network: Will Fans Ever Be First?

Leaving millions of sports fans out to dry, Dish Network, the second-largest US satellite-television provider, has discontinued carrying Fox Sports and MSG Network.

What a joke.

Now Dish Network and its approximately 14.337 million subscribers can no longer watch the wide variety of sporting events covered by Fox Sports Regional networks, and MSG.

This will cause fans to miss upcoming college football games, and if it continues, NHL and NBA contests.

It seems as if Fox is the party at fault here for strong-arming Dish Network by requesting a 50 percent price increase in their new deal, but at the same time, the two sides need to come to a resolution.  Fast.

This situation brings back my horrible memories of having to miss Yankee games as a result of Cablevision being too cheap to pony up for the new, and now lucrative, YES Network.

That particular instance caused me to switch to DirecTV, and I haven’t looked back since.

Dish Network should not have let their current contract expire without constructing a new deal, because in the world of sports, you absolutely cannot keep fans from missing a single game, or even more, if the dispute continues.

If things aren’t resolved immediately, Dish Network could lose a large number of subscribers, people that may never come back.

So I urge you, Dish Network, follow the likes of DirecTV and pay up for sports channels.

It is ridiculous to put your pettiness above the prerogatives of your customers.

We pay you ridiculous rates to get these “extra” sports channels that are the main channels we watch, and don’t complain for a minute.

So if Fox tells you to give them more money, you give them more money.  Not for them, not for yourself, but for us, the sports fans.

Because without the fans, you would not be successful.

So please, just put us first, for once.

Matt Rudnitsky is a student at the University of Michigan and a writing intern at Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Mattrud