• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, 7 hours ago

Consumer demand for sports on TV -- and at games -- continues to rocket ever higher, especially from networks, streaming, and other media.

But in turn, that means ever higher prices for consumers. How long can this go on?

A New York Timesopinion piece from sports journalist Joon Lee says that for consumers the overall sports price tag -- per year -- amounts to $4,785 a year.

This is the total for a full year of media expenses from existing pay TV providers, streaming services subscriptions, arena/stadium ticket sales, and other one-time media purchases.

For TV/streaming alone (YouTube TV, MLB.TV, NBA League Pass, NFL Sunday Ticket, Peacock, Apple TV+, Max, Amazon Prime Video, and Paramount+) Lee says his annual bill comes to $2,634 a year.

While the number of platforms has indeed expanded, Lee says sports have become in effect less accessible as higher pricing takes effect.

The situation has been made more complicated by the massive disruption to the pay TV ecosystem -- with live, linear TV continuing to take a massive hit.

All this has exposed the actual higher costs for fans of sports on TV, as well as for non-sports and casual sports TV viewers, to an extent.

Compared to five years ago, consumers now have to pay extra -- beyond their typical cable TV network bundle -- for “Thursday Night Football” on Amazon Prime Video, or “Friday Night Baseball” on Apple TV+, for example. These are two exclusive packages where viewers have to spend more money, with streaming monthly fees, to see this content.

Other in-demand sports content may be sliced and diced down the road. Consider Netflix’s exclusive Christmas Day games a year ago, with more exclusive NFL playoff games to land on individual streamers -- like Peacock had over a year ago, and what Amazon will get in the future.

Testing future price hikes to come, perhaps Walt Disney had no problem releasing a $29.99-a-month price tag for the upcoming launch of its high-profile, major media business ESPN as a full-fledged streaming platform this fall.

To be fair, Disney is offering plenty of incentives to significantly lower the price tag -- like bundling it into Disney+ and Hulu for $35.99 (with advertising).

That said, one can guess sports franchises and leagues will continue their efforts to find niches and segments to optimize revenue for all their assets.

Will consumers ever raise their hands and pull themselves out of the game?

Perhaps sports TV networks need to observe the financial troubles that regional sports networks have gone through over the last few years -- all because of local teams spiking their right fees due to ever higher player contracts.

Perhaps no so far in the future some other legacy TV/streaming business might need to call for another time out.