It's already happened in America. "Cord cutting" has become a popular phrase as more and more people leave cable tv. American sports offer their product direct to consumers via the Internet all over the world. The likes of ESPN get a few games a week.
It's younger consumers doing the cord cutting too. While it's the older ones who cling to the cable tv model.
Seems like a pretty massive example to me. It's strange to me that EPL haven't gone the same way, they have the international reach to be able to do so as a supplement to also selling certain games to local TV networks.
Donald Trump is happening in America as well
On the one hand, post-Cold War neoliberal economic policies gutted the traditional place of America's white working class, who were told that globalization was great for the economy while they watched their manufacturing jobs disappear. Real wages stagnated while inequality has risen. The political system in their country has become dominated by special interest groups and deadlocked in paralysis because of a two party system where one party can hold the executive and the other can hold the legislature. Add in a back drop of a perceived threat of Islamic terrorism, itself largely created by interventionist American foreign policy, and a partisan media, and an obsession with celebrity and "self-made" men. Now you have the right ingredients for a charlatan populist, a political outsider who is basically pulling his moves straight from the playbook of 1930s fascism, who can connect with angry disenfranchised voters in middle America in a way no traditional politician could.
On the other hand, some people are pissed off at paying too much for cable TV so they are cancelling their subscriptions.
I sure hope people in NZ keep subscribing to Sky or else we might get our own Donald Trump.