"It's like having a $50,000 house that now is worth $200,000. Things change. This is the NFL. This is football. We know how popular it is. This isn't the bingo channel."
Seth Palansky, NFL Network vice president of media relations, in the Kansas City Star
The People’s Game
“The NFL has taken its battle with the cable companies over NFL Network to the people. The question now is whether the good people of cities like Austin, Texas, and Madison, Wis., will raise enough of a ruckus to help the people in New York get America’s No. 1 game. At least the eight regular-season games that the NFL Network plans to show this season, that is.”
Jason Cole, Yahoo Sportshttp://sports.yahoo.com/nfl
Tiers for Fears
“A sports tier would be the kiss of death for NFL Network. No cable network has ever survived on sports tier carriage alone. We believe a deal will be worked out shortly. Otherwise, subs will start to flee from Time Warner [Cable] to DirecTV or Dish, both of which carry NFL Network.”
Derek Baine, Jupiter Researchhttp://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/
Sounds Reasonable?
“The NFL took a bunch of games that would have been played at reasonable times for reasonable patrons — Sunday afternoons — and announced that it will make (yet more) night games, part of a late-season package, starting this November. Then it put the package up for bids, hoping that some eager new suitor — Comcast, for one — would throw so much (more) TV money at the NFL that Jerry Jones’ new face would fall. At the same time, the NFL figured it could turn down anything short of OPEC membership because it could turn nothing into something by putting those games on the NFL Network.”
Phil Mushnick
The New York Post
A Fan’s Lament
“I don’t know about you, but I pay over $80 a month for cable TV and with what seems like 100 religious, home-shopping stations, local access and garbage stations … And now they want to charge extra for the very few stations a sports fan wants to watch.’’
John Kowalski, Time Warner Cable subscriber, in a letter to The Buffalo News
High on Highlights
“So, where should fans go to find decent, timely highlights? The NFL Network has total access and endless airtime, and they have a decent show called NFL Scoreboard that runs opposite NBC’s Football Night [in America], and on (and on) through the Sunday night game … This old highlight man can tell that these packages have been assembled by careful watchers of the game. It’s much appreciated. Nice job, NFL Network.”
Robert Weintraub, Slate.comhttp://www.slate.com/
