Speaking from my personal point of view but with knowledge of the industry, I find blackouts extremely annoying but they make sense from a business perspective. Time Warner is making their money (to pay ESPN for the sublicense, to produce the game, and hopefully turn a profit) by selling advertising in the broadcast. Because of that, they don't want you watching via the WatchESPN stream if you live in the area their network is available, which makes plenty of sense.

Now, these blackouts need to be targeted correctly to work well - it makes no sense to block somebody who cannot receive the ASN telecast, for example, from streaming it - they have no ability to generate revenue for ASN, so there is no benefit (I don't know what the maps look like being in CT, since they aren't applicable to me).

What's interesting to me is the Time Warner channel. To me, it would be very interesting to know if it is offered to the satellite providers and other cable companies in the area at all, or at an unreasonable price. Obviously they want you to subscribe to the channel, and that's fair, but if it is only made available to Time Warner Cable and nowhere else, I feel like you could be venturing into the anti-trust type of bundling (far from a legal expert here). It also has the negative of making it impossible to watch for people in rural areas who physically cannot get cable, even if they wanted to. Sadly, MAC programming is unlikely to generate the kind of uproar needed to get Time Warner to sell the channel to other distributors. Maybe the Crew will be big enough to get that ball rolling.

My views and thoughts, not my employer's, etc.