Yankees Entertainment & Sports Network is about to get much of what it wants from
Time Warner Cable, signing a deal at around $2 per subscriber monthly.
The downside is that Time Warner's New York City systems will only carry the network
part-time, sharing a channel with CNNfn.
YES will be carried full-time on digital tiers, which have fewer than 20 percent of
the operator's subscribers.
But YES will collect the full license fee based on the system's total basic-
subscriber base.
The network will also be carried on Time Warner's other systems in New
York state on analog tiers.
Cable operators have been balking at the huge, year-round license fee for a
start-up network that has only one interesting piece of programming: 130 New York
Yankees Major League Baseball games.
The Time Warner deal gives YES chairman Leo J. Hindery Jr. leverage against the other major
metro New York MSOs, Cablevision Systems Corp. and Comcast COrp.
Cablevision's Madison Square Garden Network lost TV rights when the Yankees decided to
start its own network, and that MSO wants to make YES a pay network.
