Yeah interesting question AP. I kind of answered it earlier I think.
But I watch NBA, MLB, A League, EPL and test cricket (black caps and the ashes) mostly. Also various NZF games.
3 of those 5 are available on a service like coliseums. However since sky show some MLB and NBA, its currently too expensive for me to have those 2 online. I'm unsure at which point I'd switch off.
I think you may be getting at something, which is if they were split half and half, then that would really suck. And I agree. But I'd blame sky for that more than any company offering the service online, generally superior, and for cheaper.
It's easy to bash sky - but I'm not sure that the situation for next season is going to be any better. It's more expensive overall and it's subject to the vagaries of less reliable technology.
The idea that in the future we can all just subscribe for what we want to watch and that will all end up cheaper is a great idea, but I don't see how that will happen. Yes, with sky now you pay for a lot of stuff you're not actually interested in. But it's a lot easier for sky to add a sport or a set of rights to an existing platform, than it is to justify a sport setting up it's own online platform to broadcast over the internet - you have to have a very compelling product to justify doing that in a small NZ market. There must be an element of cross subsidy there (even if at times sky has used it's dominant position in a way to make it more difficult for smaller sports to get on air). If you like a lot of sports you could end up with a lot of premium online sports packages which right now is going to be expensive.
There's also the random sports factor. Do I like being able to watch India vs Sri Lanka in some random one day tournament? Yes. Would I pay for individual rights to watch it? No
I suspect as well there is a cross-subsidy for people who watch a lot of sport from people who just get sky package without sport or who get sports packages but wouldn't sign up to something else if they decided to drop sky altogether.
If each sport ends up as a standalone internet offering I don't see that ending up cheaper, I see it ending up more expensive. Plus you then have the simple factor that's it's just a lot more of a pain in the arse to run 6 or 8 online channel packages through your computer without some sort of feed aggregator and you can't just flick channels on Tuesday evening from football, channel 2 NFL, then over to something on normal telly then back to EPL highlights that you've already watched during the ads....I dunno, i'm not sure this is a great brave new world that's so fantastic.