Sports Variety on Satellite TV
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. Many years ago you would only see a couple of college football games on Saturday and two or three on Sunday, today you can literally pick from dozens of games every weekend.
Content is king today, and as the saying goes the sports networks of course want to bring as much content as possible to the end user so they can make more money on advertising. Lots of brand new all-sports networks have popped up over the past couple of years. A few of the new networks are Altitude Sports, which carries Nuggets from Denver and Colorado Avalanche matches, and also the Big 10 network and the Mtn, the broadcast home of the Mountain West conference.
While these new channels are great for fans in certain areas, disagreements between the providers of sports programming and cable networks that deliver the content have brought trouble at times to the customer. Consider what happened last fall, the Big Ten Network began broadcasting in 2007, but they were unable to strike a deal with big cable provider Time Warner. Subscribers of Time Warner in the midwest were not able to see some of the home town teams play because of the carraige dispute. Finally however, the companies involved came to an agreement before the fall football season, so customers could remain with with Time Warner instead of having to switch over to one of the satellite television companies like DISH Network or Direct TV.
Out of market sports packages are another consideration for the customer. Many Comcast customers have switched to DirecTV because the NFL Sunday ticket is exlusively on satellite. 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. Alternative packages though are more fan friendly, such as the NHL out of market package and the NBA League Pass, which are available on almost every cable TV and satellite provider.
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