Global Update: GlaxoSmithKline Tops Access to Medicines Index

Sang Tan/Associated Press

GlaxoSmithKline hung on to its perennial top spot in the new Access to Medicines Index released last week, but its competitors are closing in.

Every two years, the index ranks the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies based on how readily they get medicines they hold patents on to the world’s poor, how much research they do on tropical diseases, how ethically they conduct clinical trials in poor countries, and similar issues.

Johnson & Johnson shot up to second place, while AstraZeneca fell to 16th from 7th. AstraZeneca has had major management shake-ups. It did not do less, but the industry is improving so rapidly that others outscored it, the report said.

The index was greeted with skepticism by some drugmakers when it was introduced in 2008. But now 19 of the 20 companies have a board member or subcommittee tracking how well they do at what the index measures, said David Sampson, the chief author.

The one exception was a Japanese company. As before, Japanese drugmakers ranked at or near the index’s bottom, and European companies clustered near the top. Generic companies — most of them Indian — that export to poor countries are ranked separately.

Johnson & Johnson moved up because it created an access team, disclosed more and bought Crucell, a vaccine company.

The foundation that creates the index now has enough money to continue for five more years, said its founder, Wim Leereveld, a former pharmaceutical executive.

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Teen girl petitions Hasbro to market Easy Bake Oven also to boys

By Tiffany Hsu, Los Angeles Times

December 4, 2012

What to get a little boy for Christmas that isn't the usual toy car set, video game or sports item? One fresh-faced activist suggests an Easy Bake Oven.

McKenna Pope, 13, is petitioning toy maker Hasbro Inc. to stop marketing the kitchen set to only young girls. She's asking for images of boys to also be placed on Easy Bake boxes.

On Hasbro's website, the Easy Bake brand is included under Cooking & Baking Games for Girls.

The Garfield, N.J., eighth-grader, moved to action by her 4-year-old brother's attempts to cook on top of a lamp's light bulb, has already scored nearly 18,000 signatures on her petition on Change.org.

On the petition, McKenna writes that she found the lack of packaging or promotional materials featuring boys to be "quite appalling." The girlie purple and pink colors used on Easy Bake ovens didn't help either.

"I feel that this sends a clear message: women cook, men work," she wrote. "I want my brother to know that it's not 'wrong' for him to want to be a chef."

As McKenna points out, many of the top figures in the culinary industry are men — Emeril Lagasse, Gordon Ramsay, Wolfgang Puck, among many others.

To really pound her point home, Pope uploaded a video in which she goads her brother into explaining the trouble with wanting an Easy Bake Oven (he also hopes for a dinosaur).

"Only girls play with it," he says as he tries to bake cookies.

tiffany.hsu@latimes.com

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Slaying of 4 rocks Northridge neighborhood

Shane Grady was jolted awake early Sunday when he heard gunfire on Devonshire Street.

He said he dropped to the floor and looked out his window, but the slowing traffic blocked his view.

Then came the police sirens and helicopter flying so low, another neighbor said, that it was "shaking the rooftop."

Residents in the usually quiet Northridge neighborhood woke up to a shocking scene. Police said two men and two women were found shot dead outside a home in the 17400 block of Devonshire in the San Fernando Valley.

Investigators do not have a motive or suspects. City Councilman Mitchell Englander, who represents the area and is a reserve LAPD officer, said police believe the slayings weren't a random act.

Officers were dispatched to the home about 4:25 a.m., LAPD Capt. William Hayes said. A 911 caller reported hearing yelling and "a number of shots," Hayes said.

Three of the bodies were found face-down, and the victims appeared to have been shot at close range, Englander said.

Officers searched the property and neighborhood immediately after the shooting, LAPD Cmdr. Andy Smith said, but no weapon was recovered.

The victims had not been identified Sunday evening. The female victims were in their 20s; one man was in his mid-30s and the other in his late 40s, Hayes said. Police believe at least some of the victims lived at the residence and may have been related.

Englander said the property was an unlicensed boarding home, but had not been a problem location for police.

That was confirmed by neighbors, who said the rooms appeared to have been rented out to single men who primarily kept to themselves. Nothing stood out, they said, except for some occasional loud music.

Englander said that about a dozen people were believed to have been living in the four- or five-bedroom home in conditions he described as "deplorable." Mattresses and makeshift kitchens were scattered about the house, he said, and one room was accessible only by a window.

A woman who lived around the block said she heard loud music hours before the shootings. About 1:30 a.m., the woman said she heard the music and people yelling. She managed to go to sleep an hour later but said the noise hadn't stopped.

"I just figured it was a party that was out of control," the woman said.

Residents described the area as quiet, the kind of neighborhood where people know one another and walk to the nearby grocery store or the synagogue down the street from where the slayings occurred.

The LAPD's Devonshire Division station is a mile away.

"It's usually sleepy-time America," said Richard Rutherford, 58, who also was awakened by the gunfire.

Englander, who chairs the City Council's Public Safety Committee, said he was "shocked" by the incident.

"Typically you don't have these kinds of incidents in this type of community," he said.

The violent crime rate for Northridge falls in the middle of all Los Angeles neighborhoods, but homicide is rare in the community, according to LAPD data analyzed in The Times' Crime L.A. database. In the previous six months, Northridge had one homicide out of the 89 violent crimes reported.

Since 2007, and before Sunday's quadruple homicide, Northridge had 11 homicides, 10 of them south of Nordhoff Street. The location of Sunday's slayings is on the border with Granada Hills, which typically has a much lower violent-crime rate than Northridge.

Jeff Kaye, 62, remembered a few incidents in the 33 years he's lived in the neighborhood. There was a shooting a few years back, he said, and he once walked in on a robbery. But nothing like Sunday's shooting had occurred.

"It concerns you," he said. "You want to know what's going on."

A few onlookers stopped by as investigators prepared to bring the bodies out of the home, and some drivers shouted questions at news crews gathered at the scene. "What's going on?" one man yelled.

"How often in this neighborhood do you hear about four dead bodies?" Grady said.

kate.mather@latimes.com

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Young down by boardwalk for benefit show

NEW YORK (AP) — Neil Young said Sunday that he couldn't see performing in the area devastated by Superstorm Sandy without doing something to help people who were affected by it.

Young and his longtime backing band, Crazy Horse, will hold a benefit concert for the American Red Cross' storm relief effort Thursday at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City. The New Jersey coastline areas were hit hard by the storm in late October.

People in the New York area who suffered damage in the storm have been supporting him for 40 years, he said.

"I couldn't see coming back here and just playing and have it be business as usual," he said. Young is touring in the area, with concerts scheduled for Monday in Brooklyn and Tuesday in Bridgeport, Conn.

Minimum ticket prices for the standing-room show in Atlantic City will be $75 and $150, although Young notes there's no maximum. He hopes to raise several hundred thousand dollars for the Red Cross.

Young said he was invited to join the Dec. 12 benefit at New York's Madison Square Garden that will feature Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, the Who, Kanye West and others, but had other obligations. Besides, there's enough star power there, he said.

"It wasn't going to make much difference whether I was there or not, so I decided to go someplace where I could make a difference," he said.

Young performed at a televised benefit in 2001 following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, memorably covering John Lennon's "Imagine."

Fans can expect a two-hour plus rock show on Thursday with opening band Everest. No special guests are planned, although Young issued an invitation to "anyone who wants to come in and play with us that we know and we know can play."

It's hard to resist wondering whether Young's epic "Like a Hurricane" will make it onto the set list, given the occasion.

"Anything's possible," Young said. "We have the equipment."

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Unboxed: Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace

THE health studies that conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around more, have always struck me as fitting into the “well, duh” category.

But a closer look at the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down. That point was reiterated recently in two studies, published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine and in Diabetologia, a journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

Suppose you stick to a five-times-a-week gym regimen, as I do, and have put in a lifetime of hard cardio exercise, and have a resting heart rate that’s a significant fraction below the norm. That doesn’t inoculate you, apparently, from the perils of sitting.

The research comes more from observing the health results of people’s behavior than from discovering the biological and genetic triggers that may be associated with extended sitting. Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yet many of us still spend long hours each day sitting in front of a computer.

The good news is that when creative capitalism is working as it should, problems open the door to opportunity. New knowledge spreads, attitudes shift, consumer demand emerges and companies and entrepreneurs develop new products. That process is under way, addressing what might be called the sitting crisis. The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard.

Dr. Yancey goes further. She has a treadmill desk in the office and works on her recumbent bike at home.

If there is a movement toward ergonomic diversity and upright work in the information age, it will also be a return to the past. Today, the diligent worker tends to be defined as a person who puts in long hours crouched in front of a screen. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, office workers, like clerks, accountants and managers, mostly stood. Sitting was slacking. And if you stand at work today, you join a distinguished lineage — Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Nabokov and, according to a recent profile in The New York Times, Philip Roth.

DR. JAMES A. LEVINE of the Mayo Clinic is a leading researcher in the field of inactivity studies. When he began his research 15 years ago, he says, it was seen as a novelty.

“But it’s totally mainstream now,” he says. “There’s been an explosion of research in this area, because the health care cost implications are so enormous.”

Steelcase, the big maker of office furniture, has seen a similar trend in the emerging marketplace for adjustable workstations, which allow workers to sit or stand during the day, and for workstations with a treadmill underneath for walking. (Its treadmill model was inspired by Dr. Levine, who built his own and shared his research with Steelcase.)

The company offered its first models of height-adjustable desks in 2004. In the last five years, sales of its lines of adjustable desks and the treadmill desk have surged fivefold, to more than $40 million. Its models for stand-up work range from about $1,600 to more than $4,000 for a desk that includes an actual treadmill. Corporate customers include Chevron, Intel, Allstate, Boeing, Apple and Google.

“It started out very small, but it’s not a niche market anymore,” says Allan Smith, vice president for product marketing at Steelcase.

The Steelcase offerings are the Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs of upright workstations, but there are plenty of Chevys as well, especially from small, entrepreneurial companies.

In 2009, Daniel Sharkey was laid off as a plant manager of a tool-and-die factory, after nearly 30 years with the company. A garage tinkerer, Mr. Sharkey had designed his own adjustable desk for standing. On a whim, he called it the kangaroo desk, because “it holds things, and goes up and down.” He says that when he lost his job, his wife, Kathy, told him, “People think that kangaroo thing is pretty neat.”

Today, Mr. Sharkey’s company, Ergo Desktop, employs 16 people at its 8,000-square-foot assembly factory in Celina, Ohio. Sales of its several models, priced from $260 to $600, have quadrupled in the last year, and it now ships tens of thousands of workstations a year.

Steve Bordley of Scottsdale, Ariz., also designed a solution for himself that became a full-time business. After a leg injury left him unable to run, he gained weight. So he fixed up a desktop that could be mounted on a treadmill he already owned. He walked slowly on the treadmill while making phone calls and working on a computer. In six weeks, Mr. Bordley says, he lost 25 pounds and his nagging back pain vanished.

He quit the commercial real estate business and founded TrekDesk in 2007. He began shipping his desk the next year. (The treadmill must be supplied by the user.) Sales have grown tenfold from 2008, with several thousand of the desks, priced at $479, now sold annually.

“It’s gone from being treated as a laughingstock to a product that many people find genuinely interesting,” Mr. Bordley says.

There is also a growing collection of do-it-yourself solutions for stand-up work. Many are posted on Web sites like howtogeek.com, and freely shared like recipes. For example, Colin Nederkoorn, chief executive of an e-mail marketing start-up, Customer.io, has posted one such design on his blog. Such setups can cost as little as $30 or even less, if cobbled together with available materials.

UPRIGHT workstations were hailed recently by no less a trend spotter of modern work habits and gadgetry than Wired magazine. In its October issue, it chose “Get a Standing Desk” as one of its “18 Data-Driven Ways to Be Happier, Healthier and Even a Little Smarter.”

The magazine has kept tabs on the evolving standing-desk research and marketplace, and several staff members have become converts themselves in the last few months.

“And we’re all universally happy about it,” Thomas Goetz, Wired’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail — sent from his new standing desk.

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L.A. mayor loses patience with port strike as talks continue

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has had enough. He wants round-the-clock bargaining to end the six-day-old strike at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, with the help of a mediator.

The strike has pitted the 800-member International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63 Office Clerical Unit against some of the world's biggest shipping lines and terminal operators. It has shut down 10 of the 14 cargo container terminals at the nation's busiest seaport complex.

Until it launched the strike Tuesday, the union had been working without a contract since June 30, 2010. Although talks intensified over the weekend, there have also been periods of little or no negotiations, the mayor said.

"This cannot continue," Villaraigosa said in the terse, three-paragraph communication to John Fageaux Jr., president of the union's clerical unit, and Stephen L. Berry, chief negotiator for the employers group.

"With thousands of members of other ILWU locals now honoring picket lines," the strike is "costing our local economy billions of dollars. The cost is too great to continue down this failed path," the mayor said.

The mayor added, "Mediation is essential and every available hour must be used."

It's a tactic the mayor has used before, encouraging an agreement between building owners and janitors that helped end a series of walkouts and protests in 2008.

In 2009, the mayor sent his senior labor advisor into talks to help avert a strike by Southern California Gas Co. employees.

The current strike has crippled the ports because of support from the ILWU dockworkers, who have 50,000 members on the U.S. West Coast and in Hawaii and Canada.

The dockworkers negotiate their contracts separately, but the 10,000 members who work at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports have honored the clerical unit's picket lines.

The strike is considered potentially disastrous for the Southern California economy because the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the leading contributors to the region's goods-movement industry, which employs about 595,000 people.

Last year, the two ports handled 39.5% of the total value of all cargo container imports entering the U.S. from origins worldwide, according to Jock O'Connell, international trade economist and advisor to Beacon Economics.

On Sunday, the union workers' employers issued a statement saying they had offered concessions on new hires but been rejected. The employers had already called for a mediator to be brought in to speed up negotiations.

Union spokesman Craig Merrilees said the union was prepared to keep negotiating. "We need the employers to stay at the table until the job is done," he said. The union's main concern has been losing jobs through attrition without new hires to replace them.

Talks aimed at ending the strike were continuing as Sunday night began.

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Downtown L.A. residents voting on streetcar project

Voting will conclude Monday in a special election on a streetcar proposal in downtown Los Angeles.

The proposal before downtown residents calls for an assessment district to be created to help finance the $125-million project. If it receives the two-thirds majority required to pass, planning would move forward, with completion scheduled in 2015.

Supporters of the streetcar say it would bring a fresh wave of economic development to downtown. Its proposed route covers 10 blocks of Broadway — where the city is working to revive old movie palaces and vacant office buildings — before veering over toward L.A. Live and then up through the financial district.

"This is really going to be the cherry on top for all the revitalization and transformation we're seeing," said City Councilman Jose Huizar, a key supporter of the streetcar. He cited estimates that the fixed-rail streetcar would bring $1 billion in development to downtown, including 2,600 new housing units and 675,000 square feet of new office space.

A group of business leaders and developers has been actively campaigning in support of the project in recent months, with a series of town hall meetings and special events.

Jon Blanchard, a member of the Los Angeles Streetcar Inc. board and lead developer of the Ace Hotel project on Broadway, said the streetcar would cater specifically to tourists and young residents downtown who prefer a car-free urban experience.

"Just for everyday purposes, it really kind of connects the city and makes it one," he said. "It makes it a lot easier for people that come down here and live down here to get around."

Some have criticized the voting process used for the project, saying it's unfair that only residents can vote while property owners would pay the assessment. The Los Angeles Downtown News also took the campaign to task in an editorial, claiming that officials were not upfront about the portion of total funding that would come from the tax assessments, versus the federal grants the project is expected to receive.

Still, there is no organized opposition to the project, and several streetcar backers said they were confident it would pass.

Ballots were due to be submitted by mail last week, but residents can still turn in their votes in person at City Hall on Monday.

sam.allen@latimes.com

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Ricky Martin finds new home on small screen

NEW YORK (AP) — Ricky Martin is saying goodbye to Broadway's "Evita." But don't cry for him.

The Latin superstar has a slew of new projects in the works, including two television series and a children's book.

"It's about growing," said Martin in an interview Friday. "It's a moment in my life where I just need to absorb and be surrounded by amazing actors and musicians and grow as an entertainer. I think this is going to be an amazing year for that."

Martin takes his final bow in the Andrew Lloyd Webber revival on Jan. 26. Then he heads down under to join the second season of the Australian edition of "The Voice." But the Grammy winner says not to expect any biting, Simon Cowellesque critiques.

"I don't believe in tough love. I believe in love, and I believe in being nurturing to new talented men and women," he said at an M.A.C. Viva Glam event for Saturday's World AIDS Day. Martin partnered with the cosmetics brand to raise awareness and funding for HIV/AIDS programs worldwide.

The "Livin' la Vida Loca" singer is developing a new series for NBC, expected in 2013. He's producing, writing and will star in the currently untitled dramedy, where he hopes to tackle social issues with humor.

He's also writing his second book and admitted he didn't have to look far for inspiration.

"I think it's time to write about things that I've been through with my kids that I'm sure many daddys out there will understand," said the father of 4-year-old twins Matteo and Valentino.

The family-friendly story about self-esteem is slated for release next summer.

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AP writer Sigal Ratner-Arias contributed to this story.

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Follow Nicole Evatt on Twitter at http://twitter.com/NicoleEvatt

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Adderall, a Drug of Increased Focus for N.F.L. Players

The first time Anthony Becht heard about Adderall, he was in the Tampa Bay locker room in 2006. A teammate who had a prescription for the drug shook his pill bottle at Becht.

“ ‘You’ve got to get some of these,’ ” Becht recalled the player saying. “I was like, ‘What the heck is that?’ He definitely needed it. He said it just locks you in, hones you in. He said, ‘When I have to take them, my focus is just raised up to another level.’ ”

Becht said he did not give Adderall another thought until 2009, when he was playing in Arizona and his fellow tight end Ben Patrick was suspended for testing positive for amphetamines. The drug he took, Patrick said, was Adderall. Becht asked Patrick why he took it, and Patrick told Becht, and reporters, that he had needed to stay awake for a long drive.

Those two conversations gave Becht, now a free agent, an early glimpse at a problem that is confounding the N.F.L. this season. Players are taking Adderall, a medication widely prescribed to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, whether they need it or not, and are failing drug tests because of it. And that is almost certainly contributing to a most-troubling result: a record-setting year for N.F.L. drug suspensions.

According to N.F.L. figures, 21 suspensions were announced this calendar year because of failed tests for performance-enhancing drugs, including amphetamines like Adderall. That is a 75 percent increase over the 12 suspensions announced in 2011 and, with a month to go in 2012, it is the most in a year since suspensions for performance-enhancing drugs began in 1989.

At least seven of the players suspended this year have been linked in news media reports to Adderall or have publicly blamed the drug, which acts as a strong stimulant in those without A.D.H.D. The most recent examples were Tampa Bay cornerback Eric Wright and New England defensive lineman Jermaine Cunningham last week.

The N.F.L. is forbidden under the terms of the drug-testing agreement with the players union from announcing what substance players have tested positive for — the urine test does not distinguish among types of amphetamines — and there is some suspicion that at least a few players may claim they took Adderall instead of admitting to steroid use, which carries a far greater stigma. But Adolpho Birch, who oversees drug testing as the N.F.L.’s senior vice president for law and labor, said last week that failed tests for amphetamines were up this year, although he did not provide any specifics. The increase in Adderall use probably accounts for a large part of the overall increase in failed tests.

“If nothing else it probably reflects an uptick in the use of amphetamine and amphetamine-related substances throughout society,” Birch said. “It’s not a secret that it’s a societal trend, and I think we’re starting to see some of the effects of that trend throughout our league.”

Amphetamines have long been used by athletes to provide a boost — think of the stories of “greenies” in baseball clubhouses decades ago. That Adderall use and abuse has made its way to the N.F.L. surprises few, because A.D.H.D. diagnoses and the use of medication to control it have sharply increased in recent years.

According to Dr. Lenard Adler, who runs the adult A.D.H.D. program at New York University Langone Medical Center, 4.4 percent of adults in the general population have the disorder, of which an estimated two-thirds are men. Birch said the number of exemptions the N.F.L. has granted for players who need treatment for A.D.H.D. is “almost certainly fewer” than 4.4 percent of those in the league.

The rates of those with the disorder fall as people get older; it is far more prevalent in children and adolescents. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using input from parents, found that as of 2007, about 9.5 percent or 5.4 million children from ages 4 to 17 had A.D.H.D. at some point. That was an increase of 22 percent from 2003. Boys (13.2 percent) were more likely to have the disorder than girls (5.6 percent).

Of children who currently have A.D.H.D., 66.3 percent are receiving medication, with boys 2.8 times more likely to receive medication. Those 11 to 17 years old are more likely to receive medication than younger children.

But Adderall, categorized by the Drug Enforcement Administration as a Schedule II controlled substance because it is particularly addictive, is also used by college students and even some high school students to provide extra energy and concentration for studying or as a party drug to ward off fatigue.

Dr. Leah Lagos, a New York sports psychologist who has worked with college and professional athletes, said she had seen patients who have used Adderall. She said she believed the rise in its use by professional athletes mimicked the use by college students. Just a few years ago, she said, it was estimated that 1 in 10 college students was abusing stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin. That estimate, Lagos said, has almost doubled.

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Rising sports programming costs could have consumers crying foul

The new owners of the Dodgers are expected to get $6-billion-plus for the TV rights to their team's games.

That may be a big win for the home team, but consumers won't be doing high-fives once they see their pay-TV bills.

The average household already spends about $90 a month for cable or satellite TV, and nearly half of that amount pays for the sports channels packaged into most services. Massive deals for marquee sports franchises like the Dodgers and Lakers are driving those costs even higher. Over the next three years, monthly cable and satellite bills are expected to rise an average of nearly 40%, to $125, according to the market research company NPD Group.

So far, people seem willing to pay. But the escalating costs are triggering worries that, at some point, consumers will begin ditching their cable and satellite subscriptions.

"We've got runaway sports rights, runaway sports salaries and what is essentially a high tax on a lot of households that don't have a lot of interest in sports," said John Malone, the cable industry pioneer and chairman of Liberty Media. "The consumer is really getting squeezed, as is the cable operator."

A key concern is that the higher bills driven by sports are being shouldered by subscribers whether they watch sports or not. National and local sports networks typically require cable and satellite companies to make their channels available to all customers.

"I pay $98 a month for cable and half of that is for sports?" said Vincent Castellanos, 51, a fashion stylist who lives in Los Feliz. "I've never once gone to a single sports channel. I wasn't even aware I was paying for it. I want my money back. Who do I call?"

Cable TV and satellite providers have long paid a premium for national sports channels such as ESPN. Now they are increasingly paying higher fees to the regional sports networks that carry local football, basketball, baseball, hockey and soccer games.

For many years, Los Angeles had just two regional sports networks — Fox Sports West and Prime Ticket, both owned by News Corp. They shared rights to the Dodgers, Angels, Lakers, Clippers and Kings.

Then Time Warner Cable entered the fray, followed by Pac-12 Networks — the Pac-12 Conference's sports service, which includes one channel devoted to USC and UCLA and another channel that focuses on the entire conference.

Time Warner Cable agreed to pay more than $3 billion last year for a long-term deal to take the Lakers rights away from Fox Sports West and launch its own sports channels. Now Fox Sports is preparing to spend at least $6 billion to keep the Dodgers on Prime Ticket. The Dodger and Laker deals could end up adding more than $10 a month to existing pay-TV bills in the region, according to industry analysts.

The competition has spawned turf wars for sports rights among big media companies both nationally and locally. NBC and CBS have launched their own national sports networks to compete with ESPN. Fox is expected to follow suit next year.

"There are not new pro and college games being created," said Dan York, an executive vice president of satellite broadcaster DirecTV. "You are getting the same product being reshuffled into smaller slices at higher prices. That's not a model consumers can continue to support."

Cox Cable executive Bob Wilson estimated that sports account for more than 50% of the bill for the provider's Southern California subscribers even though just 15% to 20% are regular watchers. "That relationship is getting way out of whack," he said.

For the sports leagues and teams, this is found money. When an investors group led by Chicago-based Guggenheim Partners paid $2.15 billion to buy the Dodgers from Frank McCourt last spring, many sports business analysts thought the buyers had wildly overpaid.

Guggenheim was betting that either Fox Sports or Time Warner Cable would spend big for the team. That gambit will probably pay off, as Fox Sports is trying to wrap up a deal this week to keep the team on its Prime Ticket channel, according to people close to the situation.

Under the current contract expiring at the end of next season, Fox's Prime Ticket will pay $39 million for the 2013 TV rights to the Dodgers. In 2014, that price tag would more than double — and continue to escalate for the next two decades. A Fox Sports spokesman declined to comment.

Sports costs are also rising because this programming is considered "DVR proof" — consumed live by viewers, and thus more valuable to advertisers and networks. Increasingly, consumers are opting to record other types of shows to watch later, and then fast-forwarding through the commercials.

"Sports are foolproof when it comes to ratings," said Charles Bergmann, associate director of Mindshare, a prominent advertising buying firm. "Sports fans can't wait to watch a game; they want to know the outcome. And that's not traditionally the case with most prime-time shows."

As a result, cable and broadcast channels that specialize in sports are able to command higher subscriber fees from pay-TV distributors. Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN gets more than $5 a month for each subscriber, from the systems that carry it, according to the media consulting firm SNL Kagan. Time Warner Cable is getting almost $4 a month per subscriber for SportsNet. Prime Ticket and Fox Sports West, which carries the Angels, together cost about $5 per subscriber, per month.

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