Team President Calls For Arbitration To Resolve NFL Network Dispute
Carolina Panthers President Says Time Warner Cable, Comcast ‘Bottlenecking’ Carriage
By Linda Haugsted -- Multichannel News, 4/8/2008 12:26:00 PM
The NFL Network is being treated unfairly because it is not owned by a cable company, according to the president of the league's Carolina Panthers, so the South Carolina legislature should pass a bill that sends cable programming disputes to an outside arbitrator for resolution.
Mark Richardson, the team executive, testified April 8 in support of the Cable Anti-discrimination and Dispute Act of 2008. The bill, the subject of a hearing before the House Public Utilities Subcommittee, states that a cable company has to treat a competitor's channel the same way in which it treats a channel in which it has an ownership stake.
In other words, if the operator's channel is offered on a basic tier, the provider would have a duty to treat the competitive channel in a non-discriminatory way and offer it on a basic tier.
The bill would address the battle between the NFL Network and the state's cable operators. The league-owned channel wants carriage on the basic programming tier, but operators across the country argue that its high cost should not be forced on all cable subscribers, including non-football fans.
Operators want to offer NFL Netwok on an optional sports programming tier.
In a white paper on the issue, the Southern Carolina Cable Television Association argues that the “NFL Network's huge programming fee is a lot for a network that doesn't rank in the top 30 channels among viewers.”
The trade association adds that the eight games offered seasonally by the NFL Network were free for fans through the league's broadcast agreements, adding the NFL now wants to make profits at the expense of its cable- and satellite-viewing fans.
Richardson told the committee that South Carolina's dominant providers, Time Warner Cable and Comcast Corp., have "bottleneck power" to keep out networks they don't own, adding that the NFL Network is going to be a “huge component of the Carolina Panthers' future success.”
The bill has yet to be voted on by the state House or Senate.
