DirecTV Imposes Sports Fee on Some Customers

DirecTV has imposed a new "regional sports fee" on new customers in parts of the country, highlighting how the rising costs of sports programming is raising the price of pay TV packages.

The satellite TV operator in late summer began adding the new fee of about $3 a month to the bill of new customers that subscribe to a channel tier above basic entertainment packages. The fee is only being added in markets like New York and Los Angeles, where multiple regional sports networks broadcast games of several major teams, a DirecTV spokesman said. Consumers who don't want to pay the new fee will have to settle for DirecTV's lower-tier packages, which come without the sports channels and various other channels such as the Cooking Channel and Fuse, a music channel. A spokesman for DirecTV said the new fee "is a way of recovering some, but not all, of the skyrocketing cost of sports in certain markets." The spokesman said that the "vast majority" of new customers still opt to buy the TV packages with regional sports networks, despite being informed of the surcharge.