NFL Vs. Comcast - You Lose!

Just recently, I signed up for Comcast Digital Cable. Now I've been back and forth from cable to dish to over-the-air broadcast, and back to cable again. The ongoinig battle between cable and dish is entertaining, but not entirely helpful. This time around, the reason we went with cable was for a couple main reasons: the cable broadband internet package simply performs better than DSL, and Comcast carried the NFL Network on its Digital Tier.

Over the last couple years since the launch of the NFL Network, there have been some interesting experiments in 21st century broadcasting taking place. The NFL, with its notoriously expensive "Sunday Ticket" package, available only on DirecTV, has been an amazing study in an industry keeping its product from its customers. With the NFL being as wildly popular in this country as it is, there are enough people willing to shell out the big bucks to get every game. This leaves those of us unwilling (or unable!) to get DirecTV stuck with the 3 or 4 games the networks so wisely choose for us to watch each week.

Then comes the NFL Network. "Sweet!" was my first response. An all-football, all-the-time channel. There will be more games to watch, more highlights, more feature stories, more gratuitous football on TV than ever!

Enter Comcast and the NFL's full-on corporate pissing contest. Never has the term seemed more appropriate. The NFL simply withholds its programming, using the power of the NFL marketing machine to hopefully coerce Comcast into sticking NFL Network on it's expanded channel tier, right alongside ESPN. Comcast, however, wouldn't comply. They blamed the ridiculously high price of carrying the network, and instead stuck it on the digital tier, left only to the digital subscribers.

So we subscribed. Was it the best bargain? No. But dangit, there are going to be several games on that channel that I'll want to see. So we subscribed this spring, all the while anticipating the overload of football information come fall.