NFL vs. cable is turning into a real nailbiter
\"Tuesday, November 14, 2006
By Adam Thompson, The Wall Street Journal
As America's traditional day of turkey and football approaches, the National Football League and some of the country's biggest cable companies are playing a high-stakes game of chicken. And just like for the Thanksgiving bird, time for a deal is quickly running out.
The NFL reportedly left as much as $400 million on the bargaining table during its last round of television-rights negotiations to reserve for its fledgling cable network eight late-season prime-time games featuring attractive teams with wide followings. The first is scheduled for Thanksgiving night between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Denver Broncos, yet nine days from the debut of live games on the NFL Network, it is still available in only 41 million of a possible more than 90 million homes wired for cable or satellite.
Cable operators such as Cablevision Systems Corp. and Time Warner Inc. are balking at carrying the network because, among other things, the league wants to boost what it charges them each month to carry the network to a reported 70 cents per subscriber. The NFL won't say how much it charges now, but it has been reported that the fee is in the low 20s.
\"We believe that the most popular programming in this country is NFL football,\" said Steve Bornstein, the network's president and CEO. \"If you can't find a way to make value there, maybe you don't need some of those other channels.\".....\"
(from here)
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Now I'm not here to justify the NFL's profit margin, nor do I want to argue against it. They can test the market and get what ever they get.
The reason I posted this is to say that I totally agree with the guys statement that I put in bold. Amen in fact! Drop half of the crappy programming, use the salvaged capital to broadcast more high definition and pay for more NFL and send all those so called \"teen stars\" and other bandwidth wasters back to public school where they can learn about the real world and back to work flipping my burgers so that maybe, just maybe, little Raven or those two brats on Zack and Cody can get my order right at Wendy's drive through! And that Katie Couric witch, she's got to be about the biggest wasted investment ever! She could get on down to BestBuy and start sellin' TV's since she can't draw anyone to watch them when she's on it! Her salary alone could put the rest of the games in high def on Cable, make the NFL happy and I could do away with the Direct TV Sunday Ticket all together!
It's a win win I tell ya!
Trade up from the ridiculous to the sublime
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Will Robinson
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Comcast recently moved it up a notch into the "gold" service, or whatever, and my wife wasn't very happy about it, because that means we don't get it anymore. The funny part about it was that they made it look like the move was to "add content" b/c they announced 3 new "basic" channels of the QVC/weather channel genre. Pffft @ the cable company- I'm not giving them mroe money to watch football. I realize that a lot of people watch it these days, but I'm hoping that the move of upping costs (Thus driving at least some football programming to premium channels) will net the NFL a loss. The die-hard's are already paying premium rates for sunday ticket.Kyouryuu wrote:Three words: Country Music Television.
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