About half to sports

Half your cable bill goes for crap, to be polite about it, but Bob Fernandez at Philly.com has the story:

Whether you are a wild-eyed fanatic or a sports agnostic, you are paying a lot in your monthly bundled cable-television bill (about fifty percent of the programming costs) for football, baseball, and other live games. And that price will continue to rise for two basic reasons: the audience for sports is vast and insatiable, and media companies are spending billions more each year for the broadcast rights to keep fans glued to their televisions.
The soaring prices for sports rights are being shouldered by almost everyone who pays a television bill, but falls hardest on those who don't care about sports and often don't know how much they are paying for entertainment they aren't watching.
"Here is a little old lady who wants to watch CNN," said Ralph Morrow, owner of Catalina Cable TV Company in Avalon, California, a twelve-hundred-subscriber system. "But I can't give it to her without $21 a month in sports."
Threatened by Internet streaming services and a fragmenting television audience, Comcast/NBC, ESPN, Fox Sports, Turner, and CBS have agreed over the last twenty months to spend $72 billion for the television rights to professional, Olympic, and college sports well into the next decade.
Billions of additional dollars will be paid for sports rights on about fifty regional cable networks, such as Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia, and college championship bowl games.
The total in national and regional sports rights could reach a hundred billion over the next dozen years.
Some televsion rights have doubled or tripled in the latest round of negotiations, disregarding the weak economy and high unemployment, as the drama of live games has eclipsed Hollywood-scripted shows, comedies, news, and movies as the most sought-after entertainment on televsion.
Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, calls sports "a great metaphor for American life", with good guys and bad guys, winners and losers, in each game. "You'd think sooner or later we will hit a saturation point, but I'm starting to think there is no saturation point," Thompson said. "People will pay for sports in their cable bill, and they will pay extra for sports."
The deals seem certain to accelerate the commercialization of college athletics - universities have been frantically realigning their conference affiliations to access new televsion money, and continue to swell the salaries of pro players and enrich team owners.

Rico says he couldn't care less about watching sports, and his ladyfriend is positively phobic about them, so half our cable bill is a waste...