One of the great things about modern cable and satellite TV is all of the sports that is now available to subscribers across the United States. While 25 years ago you would see a couple of college football games on Saturday and a few on Sunday, today you can literally pick from two dozen or more games every weekend. Even the NCAA tournament has additional coverage with the Mega March Madness on Direct TV.
The motto today is “Content is King” and as the saying goes the networks want to bring as much content as possible to the customer so they can make more money on ads. Quite a few new all-sports channels have sprung up in the last few years. Some of these include Altitude Sports, which carries NBA Nuggets and the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche matches, as well as the Big 10 network and the Mtn, the broadcast home of the Mountain West conference.
While these networks are great for fans in certain areas, disagreements between the providers of content and those who deliver the content have resulted in difficulties to the customer. Consider what happened last fall, the Big Ten Network began broadcasting in 2007, but they were in a carraige dispute with big cable provider Time Warner. Customers of Time Warner in Michigan were unable to watch some of the local teams play due to this dispute. Finally however, the parties came to an agreement before the fall football season, so customers could stay with Time Warner instead of having to switch to one of the satellite television providers such as DISH Network or Direct TV. An important thing to do when considering providers is to consider all factors, comparing DirecTV or TWC.
Specialized sports packages are another issue to deal with for the customer. The NFL TV Sunday Ticket package is exclusive to satellite TV, so if you want this football fest, you have to switch. This has left a bad taste in the mouth of some consumers, who don’t understand why a high demand package like this isn’t available to every provider, especially a big company like Time Warner. Other sports bundles though are more friendly to subscribers, such as the National Hockey League Center Ice and the NBA League Pass, which are available on almost every cable TV and satellite company. DIRECTV seems to have all of the sports programming like the NFL Sunday Ticket package.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.