If Customers Paid For Sports Subscriptions, Are They Eligible For Refunds Due To COVID-19?
Customers who have been sitting at home during the COVID-19 pandemic have often paid for sports viewing subscriptions that do not have any content. You may have paid to watch the NBA, college basketball, European soccer, MLS, MLB, NHL, and other action. These subscriptions are a cost-effective way for you to watch sporting events around the world. You can see everything from mixed-martial arts fighting to tennis, but you might be eligible for a discount. Use these tips to understand how you can recover the money you might have spent on sports you cannot see.
How Did You Pay For Your Subscription?
Read More »If you paid for the subscription upfront, you may receive a pro-rated refund because most sporting seasons have not been canceled. This means that you will get a refund for the months or weeks you have missed. You will not receive a refund for events that could occur in the future. You may need to continue to request refunds in subsequent months if sporting events do not resume.
Some sporting leagues plan to resume their schedules, and you may for their programming directly. When this is the case, you should receive the same pro-rated refund because you have not seen certain events.
What If You Have Received Partial Content?
When some sporting events have gone forward, you may not have received a full battery of programming. This means that you saw a few events without seeing everything. You can, again, ask for a partial refund. When the sporting events resume, you will pay your regular rate.
In some cases, these companies might tell you that they are you offering content for a basic subscription, but they will not give you a refund because you have not had the chance to pay for pay-per-view events. You have not been forced to pay too much money, and you may be denied a refund. Because of this, you may want to pause or suspend your subscription.
Pausing Or Suspending Your Subscription
Pausing or suspending your subscription is much easier because you can contact your content provider to pause when you know there are no sporting events to watch. These companies may allow you to pause without paying, but you should ask them how long you can pause your subscription. You might pause for 3-6 months, and you should contact the company to reinstate your subscription when sporting events resume.
If you choose to suspend your subscription, you may lose access to other online content and articles that are still offered through the company. Ask the provider if you will receive free access to this content because of the coronavirus pandemic, and you might maintain some access to sporting content.
Canceling Your Subscription
When you are not seeing sporting content, you might choose to cancel your subscription. If you do this, you are likely asking for a refund at the same time. Companies like AT&T and DirecTV want to keep your business because they can make money from you when the pandemic is over.
If you are told that you will cancel without a refund, you should ask for a refund for all the months when you did not have content. You should also remind your provider that you would like to cancel your entire subscription. Because of the pandemic, they cannot afford to lose money. You are more likely to get what you want, and you can receive some sort of refund because you have not had content to watch.
How Do You Supplement Your Sporting TV With A Family Subscription?
A subscription for any sort of TV plan will include quite a few sporting channels. These channels will give you the chance to watch content as part of your subscription instead of paying extra. While you might not want to cancel, it will help you save money if you use your regular cable plan to watch your favorite leagues.
Your regional channel will cover all the local teams, and you can see many of their games because they are guaranteed through that channel. You can save money because you are not paying for a major subscription, and you can use that money to sign up again when all the major leagues resume play.
What If You Do Not Pay For The Service?
When you have special services that provide sporting events, you might stop paying for those services. The smaller companies will simply turn off your service, and you can resume your service when you are ready. Many of these smaller companies do not have access to your personal information, and they will not send your account to collections.
In fact, most of these companies will not charge you for the months you missed. You will receive numerous emails asking you to start your subscription again, and you can ask for all the missed months to be waived so that you can restart where there are sporting events to watch.
If you do this with your cable provider, you should contact them to let them know you are not paying for a subscription add-on. At that point, they might offer to pause it until events air again.
Conclusion
You can get a refund for some of the sporting content that you have missed due to the global pandemic, but you need to contact each provider to find out what kind of discount you will get. You can threaten to not pay or cancel your subscription, and you will see what can be done for you. Ensure that you know how you paid so that you can get the right refund. This is especially important if you paid a large amount upfront.
