Comcast moves Giants to premium sports tier

Want to watch the Giants next season? If you’re a Comcast customer, it’s going to cost you an extra 50 bucks a month

The San Francisco Giants might be reluctant to spend money this offseason, but thanks to a new deal between Comcast Xfinity and NBC Sports Bay Area and NBA Sports California, fans are going to have to spend a lot more money to watch the Giants on cable next season.

Without much warning, fans of the Golden State Warriors learned that they can no longer watch games that they previously had as part of their local cable package. Thanks to a new deal, NBC Sports Bay Area and NBC Sports California no longer exist on the standard “Popular TV” package and now reside on the “Ultimate TV” cable tier, along with the official networks for the four major sports.

Functionally that means roughly $50 more in cable fees each month for local fans who want to watch the Giants, Warriors, San Jose Sharks, and the Sacramento Kings. Cable viewers who don’t want to watch local sports do get to save a regional sports fee, but people who do want to watch their local teams suddenly have to sign up for a brand-new level of cable, at a significantly higher price.

It’s another blow in the relationship between regional sports networks and the major sports they broadcast. A total of 27 teams from MLB, NBA, and the NHL lost their broadcasters when the Diamond Sports Group, owner of Bally Sports, declared bankruptcy in early 2023. They made a deal where some subscribers can watch their games through Amazon Prime, but MLB has to produce and distribute games for seven different teams.

From 2013-2020, less than half of fans in the Los Angeles area could watch Dodgers games due to a dispute between their regional network and AT&T. Many fans in Denver can’t watch the Denver Nuggets or Colorado Avalanche thanks to a stalemate between Comcast and their RSN. As consumers increasingly cut the cord and move to streaming or other options, cable providers are scrambling to make up for the lost fees in other places.

Basically, if you’re a fans of the Giants or Warriors or Sharks, this sucks for you.

Of course, NBC Sports isn’t the only channel you get when you go Ultimate. Here is an incomplete list of channels available on the XFinity “Ultimate” tier that you don’t get on the “Popular TV” package.

• The American Heroes Channel: Mainly military documentaries, which means a whole lot of shows about Nazis.
• BabyFirst: Programing exclusively for viewers 0-3 years old.
• BET Her: Shows reruns of Martin, Family Matters, Sister, Sister, Kenan & Kel and three different Tyler Perry sitcoms.
• Cooking Channel: Like the Food Network, only all reruns!
• Discovery Life: Reruns from TLC.
• Discovery Family: Mainly cartoons based on Hasbro toys.
• FanDuel TV: Because it’s hard to find cable sports programming that talks about gambling.
• FYI Channel: The only place to see reruns of “Billy the Exterminator,”
• Hallmark Mystery: If two channels of Hallmark movies weren’t enough for you.
• MTV2: They don’t show music videos either.
• Ovation: It’s not totally clear what their focus is, but they were owned by Harvey Weinstein until 2017.
• ScreenPix: Do you know what ScreenPix is? Neither do we, but you get four different channels of it.
• Sportsman: Shows about hunting and fishing, including a Sarah Palin reality show and a news magazine show produced by the NRA.
• Vice TV: They went bankrupt in 2023, but now Vice TV is the only place on cable to watch “The Draymond Green Show with Baron Davis.”

As a side note, “Xfinity” is a stupid, stupid name. It’s “Infinity” with an “X,” something a surly teenager would choose as the name for his terrible garage band that only plays Kings of Leon cover songs. Or a South African billionaire desperately trying to make Redditors thins he’s cool. It sounds like “Ex-finity,” which seems to mean, there were infinte options for you, but now there aren’t. And also it’s 50 dollars a month to watch the local sports teams collectively try to barely finish above .500. This author feels dumber simply spelling the name out.

So whether or not the Giants pony up for a new first baseman, better relief pitching, or a starting pitcher who was born after Ronald Reagan’s second term, fans will have to pony up to watch their games next season.