 jmn1207Premium
join:2000-07-19
Ashburn, VA | reply to ZachAttack
Re: NFL I understand that Cablevision is doing everything by the book in this matter, but it's the book that might need to be updated.
We don't want a situation where HD versions of channels with potentially millions of viewers are blocked from competitors. I don't want to be forced to get Time Warner Cable just for TNT HD. If Disney were to purchase or make an agreement with Comcast, would they be able to prevent ESPN HD and the rest of their HD cable lineup from being available to anyone that chooses to use a different provider?
It just seems like somebody needs to step in and take a closer look at how things currently are, and perhaps bring up some options for regulating this potential mess. I do believe this is a gray area with regards to competition. You seem to consider MSG and MSG HD as a single product, but many see them as separate and distinct entities. Where is the consumer's choice for MSG HD? Should a TV provider be allowed to own media content? Does this fuel anti-competitive abuse?
I think Verizon has deeper pockets and more influence, so I'm betting that Cablevision will eventually cave and offer the HD version. Once this happens, I'm sure the next move from Cablevision will be a ridiculous price offered to Verizon, which will send everyone back to the courtroom for more rounds of fighting.
Unless Verizon adds another 15 million FiOS TV subscribers, it will be to Cablevision's advantage to block the HD channel. Otherwise, Cablevision would probably stand to make more money from potential viewer ratings and advertisement sales. DirecTV has 20 millions subscribers, so even though they might compete on some level with Cablevision, the number of viewers was very high in comparison to Verizon's (~2-3 million), and it hurt their pocketbook more by withholding MSG HD from the satellite TV provider than by selling the right for them to include it in their lineup. |
| While I don't watch MSG, I believe MSG-HD is just MSG broadcast in High Definition. It's one product, just a different quality version of the picture.
I don't think we need more regulation when the rules as they are now work 99.9% of the time. It is usually in the interest of a cable company/broadcaster/distributor/team to have the channel available to as many people as possible. There are maybe 3 occasions where this hasn't worked, Channel 4 San Diego (AT&T), CSN-Philadelphia (Directv), and MSG-HD (Verizon), in all three cases it's sports that's the driving factor, and it's mostly the Phone company coming in like yesterday and trying to carve out niche neighborhoods to extract high profit. For almost every other channel its a non-starter these channels are made available to everyone and anyone.
Cablevision is competing with the HD Version of MSG, they're doing nothing wrong. Verizon has every other channel known to man, higher speed internet, and a half dozen other reasons they create a better product than Cablevision. Other company's don't and won't play this game, because in the end this will only hurt MSG. In your hypothetical situation where HD versions are confined to one network owned by the distributor, I think in that situation what would happen is people would stop caring, the HD Versions would wither and perish, or everyone else would eventually reach a point where everything is in HD, except those channels and that would put them at a dis-advantage. In the near future everything will be in HD anyway, so no point in withholding HD. Unless you're in a captive market with an aggressive competitor like Verizon, then I can see how being able to market Fios doesn't have all the teams in HD like io does, would be a winning strategy, at least for the present.
I think that providers can and should own content, exclusives help sell products. By having NFL Sunday Ticket, Directv has a certain group of subscribers that want only one thing, and they deliver. XM before they were bought by Sirius had MLB exclusively on Sat Radio, and that brought them a certain subscriber who wanted baseball and they delivered. |
