Cablevision’s refusal to sell the HD versions of its regional sports networks in New York to Verizon could be an issue that seals the case for eliminating the so-called terrestrial loophole that lets cable companies withhold some of its programming to competitors, avoiding program-access rules established by Congress that helped make satellite TV and telco TV businesses possible.

Or at least it’s persuaded me that the program-access rules should extend to high-definition sports programming.

(For our coverage of this issue, and the Verizon and Cablevision statements on both sides, please click here. But to give Cablevision extra due, here’s what it said: “MSG complies fully with federal regulations, which do not require us to license our local HD programming to anyone. MSG is glad to have Verizon as a customer of our satellite-delivered programming, which has provided them with access to every single game on MSG and MSG Plus.”)

A tipping point for me was a comment someone attached to a Wall Street Journal online correction. The correction had to do with Cablevision’s saying it would explore options of spinning off the Madison Square Garden unit, rather than exploring a sale. The comment came from someone who cited the FiOS complaint and said he wished Cablevision would consider selling the Garden, based on that monopoly mentality.  Cablevision and CEO James Dolan, the commenter said, don’t care about New York fans.

That’s harsh, of course, but there’s a grain of truth.

Cablevision wants to use HD telecasts of the teams that play in the Garden and whose games are televised by the Garden’s networks as a competitive edge against rival Verizon, which competes head to head with Cablevision more than any other cable operator.

That means Knick and Ranger fans who, for whatever reason, are FiOS TV subscribers can’t see those games at home in high definition.

There’s a pretty severe conflict of interest here between serving Knick and Ranger fans and operating a cable business.

I live in Manhattan, as a disclosure, and get the Cablevision-owned HD sports channels on Time Warner Cable. I don’t subscribe to FiOS, which doesn’t serve my building, at least not yet.  I don’t know when or if that will become an option for me.

I realize FiOS TV customers can see the games on Cablevision-owned channels in standard definition. But high definition is the new standard, for sports fans especially. If it weren’t so important to sports fans, Cablevision wouldn’t advertise its HD exclusivity so prominently.

I’ve never had a problem with the FCC’s decision that Time Warner Cable can withhold its NY1 local news channels from satellite or FiOS. That seems fair. There are many other alternatives for local news and Time Warner Cable ought to be able to use NY1’s unique content as a drawing card. So should Cablevision with its News 12 channels.

Verizon apparently sees the value in local news programming and is starting its own local news channels.

Verizon can’t buy or start its own local NBA or NHL franchises. That’s a big difference.

Cablevision says it’s playing by the rules. That’s fine, if the FCC agrees. But if so, the rules ought to be changed.

For a contrary view, here is an NCTA “talking point” memo about why the so-called terrestrial loophole isn’t a loophole but a well-reasoned policy decision by Congress that shouldn’t be changed. It cites precedents for the FCC’s allowing terrestrially distributed programming to remain exclusive to the cable operators that own it, including Cablevision’s MetroChannels and Comcast’s SportsNet in Philadelphia. It also notes DirecTV has exclusive access to the NFL’s Sunday Ticket out-of-market package and other TV exclusives.

English Premier League football (soccer), so tempting a product ESPN snapped up U.K. game rights and has reformated a channel there to show them on, returns Saturday, amid the buzz of FIFA 2010 World Cup and UEFA Champions League qualifying matches.

UEFA Champions League, you know, the tournament that will even be seen on FX next May, hence the promotional ads you might have seen for English Premier League matches during Rescue Me episodes. The ad is for sister channel Fox Soccer Channel, which plans two live matches on Saturday and another on tape delay.  FSC’s upcoming EPL slate is listed here.Setanta Sports USA — not to be confused with the financially ailing Setanta channel in the U.K. that had to revert the EPL rights  bought by ESPN — promoted its EPL slate today. The premium channel has one live match Saturday and three in “same-day coverage.”

(Update on Wednesday: as commenter Ivan points out, it’s been reported, by the EPLtalk blog, ESPN is close to a deal to sublicense, from Setanta SportsUSA, EPL games that air at 7:45 a.m. Saturdays and 3 p.m. ET Mondays. That’s not confirmed yet. Setanta would keep other EPL matches.)

Setanta is sharing UEFA Champions League matches (a tournament featuring Europe’s top clubs) with Fox Soccer Channel, Fox Sports en Espanol and (for the title match next May 22) FX. Fox and Setanta outbid ESPN for the rights. Fox’s schedule of Champions League matches is listed here.

Before any of that (tomorrow, coverage starting at 3:55 p.m. ET) comes a World Cup qualifying match of high domestic interest: Mexico vs. USA in Mexico City, a match that Eric Wynalda, new co-host of FSC’s Fox Football Fone-in show, confidently predicted last night the USA will lose unless it rains. To cut through the pollution, you see. He’s a former player who’s been there, done that, so I defer.

The Mexico-USA match will air on … NBC-owned mun2, a secondary channel to the Telemundo network. mun2 is arranging free previews on cable and satellite platforms to get it to as many fans as possible.

With so much inventory, spread across so many platforms — and not even getting into tasty football treats like the German Bundesliga on Gol TV — the beautiful game is poised for a great summer on U.S. TV. You might even see young men walking around bouncing a pelota on their heads all day long.

Play on.

Commercial breaks make TV viewing more enjoyable, says a story in today’s Science Times in the New York Times. It cites research from a University of California at San Diego professor, who calls the conclusion “simultaneously implausible and empirically coherent.” It has something to do with stopping and restarting a pleasurable experience. The opposite being if you interrupt a boring task like vacuuming — interrupting it makes it seem more tedious.

The story also observes that we have gotten used to taking these breaks in the TV action to do other things — go to the kitchen, make a phone call — and that even when replaying shows on the DVR, people often will pause at the break before zipping through the ads. (Some people, I hear, even watch the ads.)

I would add to this the three- or four-act structure that hourlong dramas have written in to lead up to the breaks. Time often elapses between cliffhanger and resumption, and it just works better with an actual pause.

The economy’s tanking, it’s a chilly 21 degrees in Charlotte, N.C., early this morning and attendance at the two-day NCTC winter education conference is likely down about 20%. But yesterday, anyway, I heard more optimism from small cable operators than gloom.

For one thing, according to National Cable Television Cooperative communications VP Dan Mulvenon, it was pre-planned to cap operator attendance at 250 and the target of 50 technology vendor firms are here. Last year’s version of this gathering, in Phoenix, saw a spike in attendance as small cablers wanted information about the (still) upcoming broadcast TV transition to digital and were facing a “firestorm” of other issues in Washington, as American Cable Association president Matt Polka said at the time.

And in these days of travel freezes, as Mulvenon pointed out, a 20% decline in a conference’s attendance is par for the course. Maybe even a home run.

The opening panel yesterday featured small cable firms talking about the varied paths they have taken to expand bandwidth. They need to because of phone company and satellite-TV competitors hammering them with high-capacity Internet lines and high-definition-laden video offerings. But it’s always good to hear about companies investing in their futures.

Ken Jordan, of Troy Cablevision in Troy, Ala., which has overbuilt Charter Communications, said AT&T in his markets has been poaching Internet customers with $500 buyback offers. Jordan made an eye-opening presentation about expanding into new territories using Commscope’s BrightPath’s fiber extension product instead of trying to add capacity to his aging hybrid fiber coaxial plant. So far, he said, so good. Capacity on the fiber extension is about 1 GHz, vs. about 700 MHz on the HFC mother ship. High percentages of customers on the fiber lines are buying voice (77%) and high-speed Internet services (63%).  “Overall we feel like this is going to give us a competitive edge moving forward,” Jordan said.

Bob Gessner of Massillon Cable in Ohio updated operators on his company’s ambitious project to convert to all-digital channels, thereby reclaiming analog spectrum. He’s had some hiccups (which I reported here yesterday)  with the digital-to-analog converters he needs to get to subscribers, but was upbeat about getting the transition done by the end of July and about rapidly increasing the HD channel count for his 45,000 video subscribers.

Buckeye CableSystem, also in Ohio, is using yet a different technology, switched digital video, provided by BigBand Networks and reported on by Todd Spangler yesterday. Different approaches for different situations, and Gessner said after the session that both Buckeye and Troy’s approaches had a lot going for them too.

Hopefully the cable operators here learn which approaches will work best for them, and find a way to grow and keep serving their communities. Hey, the temperatures yesterday got into the sunny 40s, and are headed into the 60s later this week.

The War Room, the documentary about the rapid-response communications team behind presidential candidate Bill Clinton, spawned the campaign message that’s become a cliche because it’s so true in every presidential race: “The Economy, Stupid.”

James Carville wrote those words on a white board in Little Rock, Ark., to help Clinton’s team stay focused on what’s important. D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus filmed the white board as they chronicled Carville, George Stephanopoulos, Paul Begala, Dee Dee Myers and other Clintonistas’ huge mood swings leading up to the Election Day win over incumbent Republican president George H.W. Bush.

Carville (once Clinton’s top strategist) and Begala are now CNN commentators, Myers contributes to MSNBC and Stephanopoulos is ABC’s chief Washington correspondent. What else has changed since The War Room (released in 1993) and what besides “The Economy, Stupid” remains essentially true?

Pennebaker and Hegedus revisited their war-room comrades for a sequel, The Return of The War Room, airing on Sundance Channel Monday (Oct. 13) at 9 p.m. They discussed it at a panel session after a screening this past Monday at the Paley Center For Media in New York City, along with Carville, Myers and Newsweek’s Mark Miller (who worked on a behind-scenes book about the ‘92 Clinton campaign).  

Cable networks’ proliferation of opinion-spouting anchors is one obvious change, but one Carville said really was just American media catching up to the norm in other countries.

“Anywhere else you go in the world there are newspapers that represent a point of view,” Carville said. “Cable TV has sort of come out now like the foreign press.”

Myers said politics-focused networks and blogs and Web sites have spread around the poll data War Room participants owned exclusively. Now, she says, it’s not unusual for someone to stop her in the market and remark about how Barack Obama is doing among white males or non-degreed working women. 

While that’s a good trend, she said, “the downside is — how do you know what’s true and how do you know what’s important?”

For so-called experts eager to provide context, there’s no shortage of outlets. “This is the full employment season for pundits,” Myers said. “There’s no pundit I know who doesn’t get 25 calls a week to go on television.”

Where politicians in 1992 might get away by just making whatever pet point they want, voters are less tolerant now, Carville said. Take the vice-presidential debate between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Sarah Palin. “She came out with her talking points and just said what she wanted to say. A lot of the commentators said she really did well. The public thought no such thing,” Carville said to general agreement (from a Manhattan audience). “I don’t say this because I’m a Democrat – that was a good debate performance in 1992 but it was not lost on people that she didn’t answer the questions.”

One lamentable change: instead of seeing people discuss ideas – “like watching a Shaw play,” Pennebaker said – an updated look at campaign war rooms would show “people just emailing themselves across the room,” Myers said.

About the economy, probably.

Sundance, by the way, kicked off a five-week string of political documentaries last Monday, with Mary Lambert’s 14 Women, about the 14 women now serving in the U.S. Senate. Mondays on Sundance are labeled DOCDAY.

The original The War Room will air at 10:30 on Monday, after the sequel.