| reply to jmn1207
Re: NFL 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. |
