One of the great things about modern cable and satellite TV is all of the sports programming now available to subscribers across the country. While 15 years ago you might find a couple of college football games on Saturday and a game or two on Sunday, today you can literally pick from two dozen or more games every weekend. Even the NCAA tournament has expanded coverage with the Mega March Madness package on Direct TV.
The motto today is “Content is King” and as the saying goes the sports networks of course want to deliver as much content as possible to the end user so they can make more money on ads. Quite a few brand new all-sports networks have sprung up in the past few years. A few of the new networks are Altitude Sports, which carries Denver Nuggets and the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche games, and also the Big Ten Network and the Mountian, the network of the Mountain West conference.
Sure these networks are great for people in certain parts of the nation, but disputes between the providers of content and cable networks that deliver the content have brought trouble at times to the customer. For example, the Big Ten Network started airing in 2007, but the network was unable to strike a deal with cable TV provider Time Warner. Customers of Time Warner in Illinois were not able to watch some of the home town teams play because of the carraige dispute. While the battle lasted a whole year, the companies involved came to terms before the 2008 season, so subscribers could stay with Time Warner instead of having to switch to one of the satellite television providers such as DISH Network or DirecTV. 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. Some Dish Network customers have switched providers because the NFL Sunday ticket is exlusively with DirecTV. This has upset some pay television subscribers, who do not understand why a package Sunday Ticket isn’t available to every provider, especially a bicompany like Time Warner. Alternative 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 Sunday Ticket.
