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Jennifer Bayoneta

Blame It on Bornstein

If there’s one person responsible for pro football migrating from free TV to pay TV in the past 20 years, it’s former ESPN chairman and current NFL Network president Steve Bornstein.

If you’re one of the few consumers without a subscription cable or satellite package these days, Bornstein’s the guy to blame for missing those new Monday Night Football games on ESPN. Ditto if you’re a Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications or Cablevision Systems subscriber on Thanksgiving, when NFL Network will carry its first live NFL game – your cable systems haven’t agreed to distribute the network.

But if you’re a pay TV provider, Bornstein is the guy to thank for putting ESPN on the map, which, in turn, helped drive the cable and satellite universe to more than 90 million subscribers.

Bornstein helped make ESPN the most profitable cable network when he first scored NFL games for the all-sports channel in 1987. ESPN only carried the first half of the NFL’s regular season during its first NFL contract, but 10 years later, it outbid TNT to acquire the full-season cable rights package – a deal that eventually drove ESPN’s monthly license fees to more than $2 per subscriber.

Cable operators often rail on ESPN for its annual rate hikes, but at the same time, affiliates consistently cite the network as the most valuable in terms of attracting new customers and driving local ad sales.

“I think football on cable television has been a boon to the values and asset creations of cable MSOs, as well as ESPN,” Bornstein said Tuesday.

Bornstein’s biggest challenge these days is convincing Charter, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable and other holdouts to carry NFL Network. As a casual sports fan, I can understand the argument from some operators: If not all subscribers are football fans, why should they all be forced to pay for the network?

But then if you look at football’s performance on cable this year – ESPN continues to set new ratings marks with Monday Night Football, pulling a 12.8 rating and 16 million viewers for the Oct. 23 New York Giants-Dallas Cowbows game, the best performance in history for a cable program – you can see Bornstein’s argument that NFL Network should be considered a mainstream channel.

“We’re not talking about a niche network here. We’re talking about the most popular content on television,” Bornstein said. Ratings are up this year for all NFL rights holders, despite the growth of new cable networks and digital-video recorders.

But there’s no chance of NFL Network posting big numbers for its Denver Broncos-Kansas City Chiefs debut game Thanksgiving night. After all, only about 40 million cable and satellite subscribers will be able to watch the game, compared with the 92 million that receive ESPN today.

But if Bornstein gets his way, viewers who realize Thursday night that they can’t catch the third game on Thanksgiving will pressure their local operators to carry NFL Network. And before you know it, NFL Network will double its distribution by next season.