Why is the NFL being sued over its ‘Sunday Ticket’ package?

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LOS ANGELES — The way the NFL can distribute its package of out-of-market games could be decided in federal court as the result of a class-action lawsuit.

Subscribers to the NFL’s “Sunday Ticket” package are claiming the league broke antitrust laws by selling its package of out-of-market Sunday afternoon games airing on CBS and Fox at what the lawsuit says was an inflated price. The subscribers also claim the league restricted competition by offering “Sunday Ticket” only on a satellite provider.

The NFL maintains it has the right to sell “Sunday Ticket” under its antitrust exemption for broadcasting. The plaintiffs say that only covers over-the-air broadcasts and not pay TV.

The case got underway on June 6 in Los Angeles.

How did this case get to trial?

The lawsuit was originally filed in 2015 by the Mucky Duck sports bar in San Francisco. On June 30, 2017, U.S. District Court Judge Beverly Reid O’Connell dismissed the lawsuit and ruled for the NFL because she said “Sunday Ticket” did not reduce output of NFL games and that even though DirecTV might have charged inflated prices, that did not “on its own, constitute harm to competition” because it had to negotiate with the NFL to carry the package.

Two years later, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over California and eight other states, reinstated the case. On Feb. 7, 2023, U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez ruled the case could proceed as a class action. Gutierrez on Jan. 12 rejected a final attempt by the NFL to dismiss the case.

Who are the plaintiffs?

The class action applies to more than 2.4 million residential subscribers and 48,000 businesses, mostly bars and restaurants, that purchased “NFL Sunday Ticket” from June 17, 2011, to Feb. 7, 2023. Google’s YouTube TV became the “Sunday Ticket” provider last season.

What are the chances of the NFL winning?

The NFL might be the king of American sports and one of the most powerful leagues in the world but it often loses in court, especially in Los Angeles. It was in an LA federal court in 1982 that a jury ruled the league violated antitrust rules by not allowing Al Davis to move the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles.

This is one of the rare times when a high-profile case for which league financial matters would become public has gone to court without the NFL first settling. In 2021, the league settled with St. Louis, St. Louis County and the St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority for $790 million over the relocation of the Rams to Los Angeles.

Why is the NFL facing long odds?

According to memos presented by attorneys for the plaintiffs, Fox and CBS have always wanted the league to charge premium prices for “Sunday Ticket” so that it doesn’t eat into local ratings — the more subscribers to “Sunday Ticket,” the greater the threat to local audience numbers.

During opening statements, attorney Amanda Bonn showed a 2020 term sheet by Fox Sports demanding the NFL ensure “Sunday Ticket” would be priced above $293.96 per season.

When the “Sunday Ticket” contract was up for bid in 2022, ESPN wanted to offer the package on its streaming service for $70 per season along with offering a team-by-team product, according to an email shown by Bonn. That was rejected by the NFL.

How much could this cost the NFL?

If the NFL is found liable, a jury could award $7 billion in damages, but that number could balloon to $21 billion because antitrust cases can triple damages. Even if that happened, the NFL would appeal to the 9th Circuit and possibly the Supreme Court after that.

How can the NFL lower the price?

The NFL could offer a team-by-team “Sunday Ticket” package, something done by Major League Baseball and the NBA for its out-of-market packages, and actively market a weekly package if fans didn’t like games being shown in their area.

Because all the major leagues offer out-of-market packages, they are keeping an eye on this case since individual teams selling their out-of-market streaming rights, especially in baseball, would further separate the haves from the have nots.

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Talking to Kevin Costner about ‘Horizon’: He’s bet everything, will it pay off?

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Kevin Costner was 23 in 1978, when he filmed his first feature, “Sizzle Beach, U.S.A.,” also known as “Malibu Hot Summer.” That’s one fact.

Another one: Kevin Costner looks right in a cowboy hat. There’s more to movie stardom than that, but with Costner, the hat may have had something to do with the stardom, which came a few years after “Sizzle Beach/Malibu,” which came from Troma, the trash-forward, money-optional film production company behind “Class of Nuke ’em High” and “Surf Nazis Must Die.”

Released in 1981, Costner’s debut feature follows three Los Angeles women, yearning for love, careers and meaning. The fifth-billed Costner plays the sole decent male in Southern California, a wealthy young stable owner sporting a cowboy hat. The hat has the added benefit of hiding the actor’s modified bowl haircut, which has not stood the test of time. But the actor has.

Ever since breaking through as the charismatic live wire Jake in his first real Western, director Lawrence Kasdan’s “Silverado” (1985), Costner has served as a genre ambassador and an advocate of the storytelling form. Now 69, he recently spent four increasingly contentious seasons on “Yellowstone,” settling scores and clearing the horizon of varmints anywhere near the Dutton ranch. Now, as producer, co-writer, director and marquee attraction, Costner’s the largely self-financed force behind a four-film gamble known as “Horizon: An American Saga,” set in the Civil War era.

Part One opens in theaters June 28. Costner and company return to theaters for the already filmed Part Two on Aug. 16. However these fare, he’s making two more. He has been filming Part Three for a while now. Like Costner’s own “Dances with Wolves” (1990), which won him Oscars for best director (first time out) and best picture, the script by Costner and Jon Baird devotes some acreage to First Nation characters and actors, though concentrating in the main on various groups of white men and women moving West.

Like the 1962 film that changed his young life, “Horizon” believes in an old-fashioned vision of the American pioneer spirit, without a lot of moral complication. Costner plays a loner and gunslinger, Hayes Ellison, who in Part One of “Horizon” takes on the role of protector of sex worker Marigold (Abbey Lee) and the newborn in her care. The filmmaker says he mortgaged his place in Santa Barbara to help finance the first two “Horizon” movies and their $100 million budget.

Early box office tracking data for “Horizon” hasn’t been great; same with the reviews coming out the film’s world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last month. Costner and distributor Warner Bros. Pictures figure the project’s best hopes lie with audiences outside New York and Los Angeles. The pre-release push involved Costner’s promotional blitz with stops in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Dallas. For the Chicago regional junket, the studio flew in and put up TV, radio and some print and online journalists from Cleveland, Kansas City, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Detroit.

“I’ve got so much at risk on this,” he told me during our interview at the Western-themed Frontier restaurant on North Milwaukee Avenue.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: You were filming Part Three of “Horizon” just last week?

A: Two days ago, in fact. We called wrap on Saturday for a while, and we’ll come back to it in August. We were filming down in this incredible box canyon, the kind of landscape I love to set drama against. In Utah, out of St. George, about two hours north of Las Vegas. I’ll finish Part Three by the beginning of October. And then I’ll figure out how to make the fourth one.

Q: First time I saw you in a movie was “Silverado,” in 1985. I remember the audience really responding to what you were bringing to it, just the glee and the —

A: The juice! It was a flashy role, so it was good for me. I didn’t really know how to play it at first. I knew I’d make Westerns someday; somehow, in my own psyche, I just knew it. I figured I knew how to play the laconic Scott Glenn role, or one of those other roles. But this one, this kid was literally swinging on the bars (in a jail cell), just full of juice. At first I thought, god, I didn’t know how to do this. But I figured it out. I loved being in that movie.

I think Larry (Kasdan, the director, who cast Costner in “The Big Chill” but cut his part out of the final version) was a big foundation for me. The rehearsals he did, the room he afforded his actors, and how gracious he was with them. He’s such a skilled writer. Between him and (writer-director) Ron Shelton (“Bull Durham,” “Tin Cup”), there was a lot to appreciate just being around them. Quality people. Decent men, who happened to be great storytellers.

Q: And it was just three years after “Silverado” that you started thinking about what became “Horizon”?

A: Right, 1988. I actually commissioned the story through his brother, Mark Kasdan. He wrote the first version, called “Sidewinder.” And I liked it. And I couldn’t get anyone to make it. But (years later) I was working on it with a friend of mine, Jon Baird, who said he wanted to just keep writing. And he wrote four more.

There was something wrong about the first one. Not wrong, maybe, but originally the town of Horizon was already there at the start. I started to think about that, and the idea that all these towns in America started with somebody putting a stake in an ant hill and saying “This is mine.” On the frontier there was a lot at stake when somebody said that. So I thought: What if we explored how these towns came to be?

There’s been a lot of scripts I’ve liked that (took years to sell). I walked the street with Ron Shelton trying to sell “Bull Durham.” “Field of Dreams” was a really difficult movie to sell.

I’m about as mainstream as you can get. But I do believe in the nuances of subplot, and I try to invest in character. With “Horizon” what came to dominate, really, was the women in it. The more we wrote, the more central they became. But it doesn’t keep me from the action, or eliminate the gunfights.

Q: Let’s talk about “How the West Was Won” (1962), which is a big influence here.

A: That was the first time I fell in love with the West at the movies, starting with that opening image, and Spencer Tracy’s voice, and James Stewart dressed in skins. Not the Jimmy Stewart we knew. I remember that birch bark canoe with the tar. I was seven, and I was transported.

Q: Did you see it in Cinerama?

A: Yeah, at the Dome! (To note: The Hollywood Cinerama Dome theater is scheduled, after renovations, to reopen in 2025.) I was seven or eight. At the time my feet were dangling about this far off the chair (demonstrates, smiling). I didn’t leave for the intermission; I didn’t want anybody to take my seat. I was there for a little boy’s birthday party, but I was by myself. The other kids were fartin’ around, running around. I don’t think I left my seat.

Q: Your family moved a lot when you were that age, is that right?

A: My dad worked for Consolidated Edison. His family had lost everything in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, just like “The Grapes of Wrath,” and they had to come to California. He had one job and never looked for any other opportunity because he was afraid that job might be taken from him.

We moved quite a bit, when I was in ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th grade. That was a difficult time for me. I think I started to lose a lot of confidence. Just trying to fit in, not being able to fit in. I had it better than a lot of kids, ‘cause I could play sports, so I could get on a team, find some friends. A little bit. But I was kind of undersized, and my brother was over in Vietnam. A complicated time for me.

Actor/producer Kevin Costner at Frontier restaurant in West Town on June 10, 2024.. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

Q: Do you recall the first time you rode a horse?

A: Second or third grade. This kid I knew had a horse, and sometimes kids with horses just don’t want to ride them anymore. But I did, so I’d come over and ride. I remember being underneath trees, and I’d jump up and hook my arms under a tree limb and (hang there), hoping the horse would go by past me, and imagine the bad guys riding underneath me, and I’d whistle for my horse to come back. Of course he wouldn’t come back; he was a mean little horse. So that part of the movie in my head never happened for me. There I was, up in the tree, seven, eight years old, making stuff up. This was up in Santa Paula in Ventura County.

Q: How did you and your “Horizon” work together on the screenplays?

A: Well, Jon (Baird) is a bigger research guy than I am. I’m a human behavior guy. It just goes back and forth between us. I just put another sequence into Part Two when we filming Part Three (the other week), a five-scene sequence I felt was necessary. I wrote it, gave it to Jon, he did his thing to it, and we got what we wanted. Just trading back and forth. He’s the strength of our writing team; I round out a lot of things.

On “The Big Chill” and “Silverado,” we had anywhere between two and four weeks of rehearsal time. That’s just not a given anymore. All my other movies I’ve directed, I’ve tried to do two or three weeks of rehearsal because I believe so much in it. My actors in “Horizon” have not had that. “Horizon” we shot in 52 days. “Dances with Wolves,” we had 106 days. When I did “Wyatt Earp” with Larry (Kasdan), that was 113, 114 days. My dp (director of photography J. Michael Muro) couldn’t sit around waiting for perfect light. We just kept going.

Listen, I’ve got so much at risk on this. It’s the price you pay to do the story you want to do, if you believe in your connection to the audience. And yeah, I’d like to get my pile back. But not so much so that I’d want to spit on my life, and not do what I wanted to do.

“Horizon: An American Saga” opens in theaters June 28.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

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Union Depot to host 50th Skyway Blood Drive on Thursday with free Saints, Padelford, orchestra tickets

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In the early days of the pandemic, alarmed by the cancellation of corporate blood drives, Lowertown resident Bill Hanley got together with like-minded community volunteers and organized a Red Cross drive of his own at the downtown St. Paul Union Depot.

Inspired, he organized another at the same location a few weeks later, and then another and another.

On Thursday, Hanley will help oversee his 50th “Skyway Blood Drive” at the transportation hub off Kellogg Boulevard, better known as the home of Amtrak and a nexus for intercity coach buses like Greyhound. At a time when blood donations nationally have fallen to a 20-year low, his effort has been a mainstay. He learned from a career in public television that building up habits — like regularly-scheduled news programming — is key.

“We’ve done it every month since COVID began — it’s the third Thursday of every month,” Hanley said.

To mark the 50th drive, Hanley secured donor incentives from the St. Paul Saints, Minnesota Chamber Orchestra and Padelford Riverboats. Every donor at the Union Depot on Thursday will walk away with a free pair of orchestra tickets. First-time donors to the Skyway Blood Drive will get Saints tickets. And there are 10 pairs of Mississippi River cruise tickets in the mix.

“We’re trying to incentivize new donors,” said Hanley, the former news director for Twin Cities Public Television, noting that a surge in blood donations during the pandemic is now a trickle.

In January, the American Red Cross declared a national emergency due to blood shortages. They’re experiencing the lowest number of people giving blood in the last 20 years — a 40% decline over two decades. Among the factors, blood drives at corporations have become harder to pull off in the days of remote work, while safety protocols — such as raising the minimum hemoglobin thresholds — have tightened, making it harder to get donors ages 16-18.

If there’s been a silver lining for Hanley, it’s the outpouring of support from downtown businesses, workers and residents. Securian Financial has sent volunteers to help staff the blood drives, and Hanley called the historic Union Depot an excellent host that no longer charges him a fee to use the space. “I went to them and said, tell me again why a Ramsey County facility is charging the Red Cross anything?” he said. “And they dropped it.”

Thursday’s event is almost fully booked, Hanley said, but anyone interested in signing up for a future Skyway Blood Drive can visit RedCrossBlood.org or call 1-800-RED-CROSS (1-800-733-2767) to make an appointment.

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Should you use a HELOC to pay your kid’s college tuition?

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By Kate Wood | NerdWallet

Proud of your new high school graduate but still wondering how you’ll pay for college? If you’re a homeowner, you might be eying your home equity, the current value of your home minus the amount still owed on your mortgage.

College tuition has been on the rise, but so have home values, and in March 2024 real estate data provider ICE Mortgage Technology estimated that American homeowners are sitting atop roughly $11 trillion dollars in tappable equity.

A home equity line of credit, or HELOC, is one way to turn that equity into usable funds. Because a HELOC is a second mortgage, your primary home loan’s interest rate — which for a majority of homeowners is well below current mortgage rates — remains intact.

So if you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to come up with cash for those tuition bills before back-to-school season, should you consider a HELOC? Before you decide, weigh the possible benefits against the drawbacks — including a huge one — and review all your options.

Why equity borrowing is tempting

HELOC benefits go beyond keeping your current mortgage interest rate. For one, a HELOC may enable you to borrow a sizable sum. Lenders will usually let well-qualified homeowners borrow up to 80% of their home equity.

For example, say you have a $350,000 home and you still owe $150,000 on the mortgage. That means you have $200,000 in equity and could get a HELOC that goes up to $160,000. In contrast, with a federal Parent PLUS loan, you’re limited to exactly what’s needed: your student’s school-determined cost of attendance minus any other assistance they receive.

And because you aren’t required to use the money for educational expenses, as you are with federal student loans, you could use cash from a HELOC for other necessary expenses.

With a HELOC, you don’t take out all the money at once. Instead, you borrow from the line of credit as needed during what’s known as the draw period. You could borrow as the bills come in, and it may be easier to roll with unexpected costs, like a summer study abroad program.

Interest rates on Parent PLUS loans hit a record high for the 2024-2025 school year, and private student loan interest rates may also be in the 8% to 9% range, if not higher.

“Since interest rates are comparable, it may be a better fit to pursue a HELOC,” Noah Damsky, a chartered financial analyst at Marina Wealth Advisors in Los Angeles, said in an email. But, Damsky emphasized, “Parents need to evaluate alternatives to borrowing against their homes.”

Risks and drawbacks

Failure to repay any loan against your home, including a HELOC, can result in foreclosure.

“While the interest rates might be competitive or even better than a private student loan or a Parent Plus loan, the ramifications of something going wrong [are] far too great,” says certified financial planner Nick Marino, CEO of Breakaway Wealth Planning in Columbus, Ohio. Think through the risk, he advises. “You have kids at college, but they don’t have a home to go back to. Was it worth it?”

Second mortgages are not the fastest or easiest way to get cash. HELOC borrowers may wait more than a month between applying and accessing funds. You’ll benefit from shopping lenders and getting multiple rate quotes, and you’ll want your financial stats — like your credit score and debt-to-income ratio — to be in solid shape. That’s comparable to shopping for private student loans, but it’s much tougher than qualifying for a federal Parent PLUS loan. Though you’ll go through a credit check for Parent PLUS loans, there’s no minimum credit score, and borrowers may even be eligible despite previous credit challenges.

HELOCs generally have adjustable interest rates, which can make it hard to predict what your monthly loan payments will be. In contrast, with a Parent PLUS loan, you lock in the interest rate when you take out the loan. Borrowers may choose a fixed rate for private student loans, and refinancing is an option for private loans if rates drop.

How to make a smart choice

Start by taking a step back and assessing your financial needs. Prioritizing retirement savings is crucial, says Stacy Dervin, a CFP and CFA at Tailored Financial Planning in Eugene, Oregon.

“Underfunding your retirement to fund your child’s education now may only delay financial costs for your child,” Dervin said in an email. “If parents outlive their money, their adult children can end up paying for the parent’s late-in-life health care or living expenses.”

Here’s a practical guide to sorting through how to find money for college.

1. Start with the FAFSA

No matter how you think you’ll pay for college — and despite the past year’s issues — start by filling out and submitting the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. This will allow you to see how much money your kid could receive from grants, programs like work-study and some scholarships, none of which have to be repaid.

2. Consider federal loans

Federal loans, whether student loans or Parent PLUS, should be considered next. Federal student loans have fixed interest rates that are set based on the year they’re originated, not your financial characteristics. That can be especially helpful for borrowers who don’t have much credit history, but federal loans are a solid choice regardless of your credit score.

3. Use private loans sparingly

Even if you think you could get a better rate elsewhere, federal loans offer borrower protections and flexible repayment options that you’re unlikely to find on a private student loan. Federal loans also may be eligible for eventual forgiveness. But if you’ve hit federal loan limits and it’s not enough, private student loans could be an option to fill those gaps.

4. Exercise caution with other financing sources, including HELOCs

If you consider the risks and decide to use a HELOC to help pay for college, take the time to run all the numbers, figuring out how much you’ll borrow and what your repayment strategy will be. HELOCs often require interest-only payments while you’re withdrawing money, but putting off paying back the principal could leave you strapped for cash when the repayment period kicks in.

Because it can’t be said enough: A HELOC is secured by your home, and failure to repay has dire consequences. Marino notes that even if a HELOC was a client’s least expensive option for education funding and they had sufficient assets to repay the HELOC at any time, “I still probably wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but I could get more on board with it.”

Kate Wood writes for NerdWallet. Email: kwood@nerdwallet.com.