Whether pay-TV customers watch football or not, they’re about to get blitzed.
Sports costs are driving up bills, with cable and satellite-TV providers paying increasingly higher rates to carry national sports channels such as ESPN, as well as regional channels like the YES Network.
Assuming pay-TV providers pass along those rising costs to subscribers, New Yorkers could end up paying an additional $44.28 next year, or a total of $314.04, for sports channels that come packaged with most pay-TV services.
That’s up 16.4 percent in just two years, based on estimated subscriber fees sports channels will charge distributors to carry their channels, according to SNL Kagan.
“Insane TV sports contracts will cause cable- and satellite-TV bills to skyrocket,” Matthew Polka, president and CEO of the American Cable Association, told The Post.
The price of sports channels is creating havoc with distributors who increasingly view high-speed Internet and phone services as their core business and pay-TV packages as a “nuisance,” as one source put it.
Providing sports channels on the typical basic package costs distributors as much as $14.76 a month per household, or $177.12 a year, according to SNL Kagan.
Regional sports networks like YES and MSG tack on another $11.41 to the monthly charges, or $136.92 per year.
Disney’s ESPN, the single-most expensive channel to carry, will hit $5.26 per subscriber, up from $5.01 this year. The YES Network, home to the Yankees, will cost distributors $3.20, up from $2.99 in 2012.
DirecTV just added a monthly $3 sports surcharge for some new subscribers.
“We expect to see more of this until consumers have the ability to opt out of expensive sports programming,” Polka said.