posted under: NFL Network, Time Warner Cable sucks
When Can I Get The Green Bay Packer Channel?
Much to no one’s surprise, the National Football League announced yesterday that they will televise eight regular season games in prime time on its own NFL Network next season. The games will be shown on Thursday and Saturday nights, starting with a Thanksgiving night contest. Four of the games are being pulled from Saturday games that would have been shown on CBS and Fox and four others from regular Sunday game slots. In making the announcement, the league says that the games will also be offered to local over-the-air stations in those markets.
Speaking as one who does not get (and doesn’t really want) DirecTV, I’m generally in favor of anything that gets more games out there on television. The problem here, of course, is that not everyone gets the NFL Network because some cable systems (such as Time Warner Cable) do not offer it. Hopefully, the addition of games will provide the necessary leverage to force TWC to add the channel to their line up, but so far the company has been pretty resistant to the league’s efforts. This is also the same company that took ABC off the air for a day or two because of some petty little spat, so I’m not shocked by anything TWC tries to pull.
But I am a little disappointed that the league seems to have abandoned the idea of distributing NFL games through pay-per-view or some other mechanism available to more people than satellite subscribers. I know they get billions from the broadcast networks and that limited availability is part of the equation, but it really seems like there is more money being left on the table here. I for one would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for more games, especially if I could choose the games, and I think there are tons of fans who would also pay for that kind of access to games outside their home market.
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February 4th, 2006 at 9:34 am
I am no rep or direcTV employee, but I always hated the cable company for good reasons. I got my dish 6 or 7 years ago for 2 reasons - to be able to watch the Packers every week (as a New England native and Packer fan since 1965, I suffered for many years w/o Packer games) and to divorce cable. You say the league should go more pay per view, I say god forbid. The league would benefit, fans would suffer much higher costs.
The current DirecTV method works fine. First, for the same or less than cable you get much more progamming and better quality. So cost w/o the Sunday Ticket package is a push.
Now consider what Sunday Ticket does - the $200 or so per season seems high at first, but breaks out like this:
Max of 16 games per week
1 Monday and 1 Sunday available to everyone free (more or less)
Avg 3 per Sunday avail free from local channels
Take out 2 per week for bye weeks (Sept, Oct, Nov)
That leaves 9 games per week (avg - never mind Thursday etc) you can only see on DTV. That’s at least 119 games/season for $200.
Pay per view would be AT LEAST $20/game which would increase my cost to $320 just to watch the Pack out of market - and I would pay it, hating Tagliabue each time for being the LAWYER he is.
Get a dish - you will enjoy football more, and whatever other TV you watch will be better too.