This is a Football Ping List, NOT whatever that game is the Dolphins attempt to play!
Posted on 12/19/2007 5:22:15 PM PST by Snickering Hound
WAHINGTON — Two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the NFL on Wednesday threatening to reconsider the league's antitrust exemption if it doesn't make games on the NFL Network available to more viewers.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., expressed concern that many fans in their home states will not be able to see games on the channel involving the New England Patriots or the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Leahy is the committee's chairman, and Specter is its ranking member.
"Now that the NFL is adopting strategies to limit distribution of game programming to their own networks," they wrote, "Congress may need to reexamine the need and desirability of their continued exemption from the Nation's antitrust laws."
Eight games air this season on the NFL Network, which is available in fewer than 40 percent of the nation's homes with televisions. The league has been feuding with several major cable companies over whether they should carry the channel as part of a basic package.
Games are simulcast on free TV locally for each team, but that doesn't include regional markets such as Vermont for the Patriots or parts of Pennsylvania for the Steelers. NFL officials have repeatedly said they will not agree to any distribution arrangement that only involves games and not year-round broadcast of the channel.
No ping for the Parcells to Miami post, huh? I see how it is!
Here’s the scary thing to consider: they don’t charge the cable companies, they don’t sell commercial time, and yet they’re probably the two most profitable (by ratio) channels on cable.
If you live in the home market of either team for the games that are shown on the NFL Network you are still able to see those games on your local network.
Since when do people have “a right” to see NFL games outside of their own markets?
Well, im sure the products they sell on the channels is a commercial for the product (and they hype that crap) so QVC/HSN makes a boatloads. Pretty ingenious really.
It ain't the money. I am a conservative and it is all principle. Rush Limbaugh makes a lot of money and he earns and deserves it. He has an audience and the business model is, if people listen to him he succeeds. This drives liberals crazy, we call it a free market. Conservative talk radio succeeds because it succeeds in a free and competitive market. Liberals do not succeed in the marketplace, they need subsidies. I resent the fact that ONE PENNY of my cable bill goes to the Clinton News Network. Our founding fathers called it tyranny when newspapers were taxed, imagine what would happen if they were told that in order to buy Fox News Channel, an electronic form of newspaper, that they would have to buy and pay for CNN as well? I laugh when I hear the term consumer advocate, if there were such an animal then this is the issue that they would be riding. But there is not an ounce of political support amongst the clowns in either party for reasons outlined in my earlier post, and self-proclaimed men of the people, buffoons like Bill O'Reilly will not take on this issue because those in the media will not bite the hand that feeds them very very well. Without any political support, or media coverage, then we will be forced to endure this tyranny. The FTC will not allow this sort of bundling but the FCC is a different animal. The liberals decry conservative talk radio because it succeeds in a free market, and conservatives decry liberal cable news networks like CNN and MSNBC. Liberals and Republican toadies like Trent Lott talk of doing something about the free marketplace where conservative talk radio thrives, but conservatives whine about the liberal media when they financially support it through "subscriber" fees.
You do have a choice. You don’t have subscribe at all. Is it a ‘fair’ choice? No, probably not but life isn’t fair. This is part of free market economy. No one is putting a gun to your head and making you watch CNN. You are either pissed off enough to dump cable so none of your money goes to CNN or you’re not. Which one is it?
I'd be ecstatic if Congress spent the entire session monkeying around with football.
Those same cable companies provide PBS and other networks "air" without owning stock in the corporations which produce the programming.
It's the cable companies who refuse to air the NFL Network, not the NFL Network who won't allow them to. Moreover, the cable companies refuse to air NFL to the detriment of their viewers by preventing, for example, Patriots fans who live in California from being able to watch Pattys replays.
Eventually, customer dissatisfaction with this pecuniarily cynical practice will pressure the cable jerks into capitulating and airing the NFL Network. It's just a matter of time.
Meanwhile, somebody tell those misguided Congressholes to get back to work and stop screwing around with such insignificant crap.
What a bunch of pointless grandstanding pantloads. ;-/
if I paid for it, I should be able to see it without an additional price to watch it on the telly, which I also pay for....
I have Dish Network's basic programming... NFL Network is on it. I watch it every day. You don't know what you're talking about.
;-/
I understand the deal. I had a C-Band satellite dish in 1982. And when C-Band was viable, there was true ala carte programming available to them. Just because we have people called "lawmakers" who oversee and make the the practices you talk about legal, does not mean they are not racketeers. I have seen Governors raid public pension plans to degrees Jimmy Hoffa never dreamed about. I have seen payday loan operations charge interest rates that only loan sharks charged decades ago. I see people go in convenience stores and buy 50 dollars worth of lottery tickets with a credit card. In the good old days, the numbers racket was pretty much a cash operation and the suckers were not allowed much credit. Racketeering has gone legit, just as Michael Corleone told his wife Kay it would. Politicians are still bought and paid for, but they are not owned by the Mafia, unless you are talking about the likes of Barry Diller and the so-called Velvet Mafia who definitely control some companies that you named.
Ba-dum-TISH indeed.
I’m feeling sufficiently high right now to say that the real punchline to this season will come on Sunday, when the Patriots go 14-1.
Then the Dolphins will lose to the Bengals and mathematically sure the #1 overall pick—almost very likely someone who will haunt Tom Brady for the sunset of his career.
Nice rant. It demonstrates that you’re completely emotion based on this and desperate to ignore all the most simple logic, but it’s a nice rant.
Here’s the reality: there is never anything wrong with using one product to help you sell another. Food companies put coupons for products that aren’t selling well in the packaging for products that are. Video game consoles get sold at a loss so there’s a market for the video games, which the console companies produce some of and get fee for the rest. And Discovery the company uses the popularity of Discovery the network to help them sell Science the network no one watches. There’s nothing wrong with this, there never has been anything wrong with this, and there never will be anything wrong with this. And if you don’t like it don’t get cable, there’s an easy way out of the game and lots of fun things to do without TV.
How many folks care about NFL coverage when they aren't playing games? Some hardcore gamblers, perhaps.
Actually, I really enjoyed having the NFL network on my satellite package before I canceled it. They showed a lot of older and some classic games, as well as a lot of very interesting shows about football. Being able to watch a football game featuring players I grew up watching was a lot of fun.
Mark
Your high on it now, but just wait until Parcells decides to start negotiating with another team mid-season. I don’t know if “directors of football operations” are covered by any CBA that will give the Phins draft picks for that, probably you guys will just be left high and dry. Parcells is a jerk, if he became associated with the Steelers I’d stop being a fan until he left.
I think not. This is not an example of a free market in a country as mature as ours. The Constitution charges government with the regulation of interstate commerce. They do so in all kinds of onerous ways dictated to them by the special interests. I do have choices and I exercise them, but a congress which has a 11 per cent approval rating is not getting a pass from me on this issue. I rarely get to meet any of that ll per cent on this forum, but it was enlightened meeting you, because I always wonder just who that ll per cent is.
Parcells is indeed a jerk, but this is the exact job he wants—Supreme Organizational Football Overlord. He was offered the GM job and turned it down, which means he’s more interested in hiring the guys and looking over their shoulders once in a while rather than actually doing the hard work.
Basically he’s the football director that Huizenga kept hoping his head coaches would be.
He’ll love, all the way up until somebody else gets credit for anything good that happens. Then he’ll get all mad and leave.
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