St. Cloud Times MN
Your turn: Let those who really want Big Ten Network pay for it
By Arthur E. Thomas, National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education
August 23, 2007

Des Moines Register
Basically, it's third and long for would-be viewers of network
By Sean Keeler , August 2, 2007

New York Times NY
COLLEGES; Not everyone wants channel that's all Big Ten, all the time
By Richard Sandomir, June 18, 2007

Cedar Rapids Gazette
Watching sports on TV will be more costly
By Scott Dochterman
Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Mediacom Communications Corporation announced today that Fox Cable Networks has denied requests made by Mediacom and Iowa State University to televise this evening’s football game between the Iowa State Cyclones and the Kent State Golden Flashes because Mediacom has not agreed to launch the Big Ten Network at prices and on terms demanded by Fox.

“Fox is utilizing deplorable anti-competitive tactics by depriving Iowa State students, alumni and fans their football season opener on cable television. Given that Iowa State is not a member of the Big Ten Conference, Cyclone fans should not be used as pawns in the Big Ten Network negotiations. We believe that Mediacom customers, particularly Cyclone supporters, will be outraged once they become aware that they are being held hostage to the unilateral demands of Fox,” said Ed Pardini, Senior Vice President of Mediacom’s North Central Division.

In Iowa, Mediacom routinely utilizes the Mediacom Connections Channel to offer unique sports programming to its customers at no additional cost. In fact, this Saturday Mediacom will televise the football season opener between the University of Iowa Hawkeyes and the Northern Illinois Huskies on the Connections Channel. Unlike 2006, Fox this year has refused to permit Mediacom to televise Iowa State’s first football game.

As a member of the Big Twelve Conference, Iowa State games compete for television viewers with those of the Big Ten Conference and its member schools, including the University of Iowa. Had Fox granted Mediacom the right to televise the Iowa State vs. Kent State game, it would have competed directly with the scheduled launch tonight of the Big Ten Network.

“Mediacom is ready and willing to launch the Big Ten Network. However, by demanding widespread distribution in Mediacom cable systems throughout Iowa and in other states and charging astronomical fees for a start-up, the Big Ten Network is essentially forcing all of our customers to subsidize the athletic budgets of the University of Iowa and other Big Ten schools, while fattening the bottom line of Fox, which owns 49% of the Big Ten Network. If Mediacom were to accede to Fox demands, it would be unfair to competing universities and their fans, and to the hundreds of thousands of our other customers who simply do not want to pay for the Big Ten Network at any price,” concluded Pardini.

Mediacom Communications is the nation's 8th largest cable television company and is one of the leading cable operators focused on serving the smaller cities and towns in the United States. Mediacom Communications offers a wide array of broadband products and services, including traditional video services, digital television, video-on-demand, digital video recorders, high-definition television, high-speed Internet access and phone service.

Contacts:
Phyllis Peters
Senior Manager, Communications
515-246-2295

Tom Larsen
Vice President, Legal Affairs
845-695-2754

Critics on Wall Street have often quipped that the Ford Motor Co. is not a car company with health care problems but a health care company with car trouble. Strangely, the universities of the Big Ten sports conference seem to be in danger of falling prey to a similar problem as they launch an expensive new sports channel: becoming a publicly funded sports franchise with classrooms.The Big Ten Network is indeed quite an accomplishment for the conference — a professional cable channel that will devote itself to 24-hour coverage of Big Ten sports, from football and basketball to wrestling, diving and volleyball, potentially giving unheralded college athletes a grander stage and bringing the students, alumni and fans closer together than ever before.

As a former college football player and avid sports fan, this kind of channel would be normally right up my alley. And yet, news coverage of the Big Ten Network has been overwhelmingly negative. Sports columnists have complained that the network's slate of games are largely "fifth-tier" leftovers and have claimed the Big Ten is demanding that consumers pay far too high a price for what the channel offers.

Serving up leftovers.

What went wrong? In part, the Big Ten's existing media deals are to blame — the conference has already sold the TV rights to its best football and basketball games to channels such as ABC and ESPN for about $100 million, so the remaining ones the BTN gets are, by definition, second- and third-pick games.But it's not only the quality of the games that has people riled up about the channel. It's the fact that the Big Ten is demanding its new network be carried on basic cable, amounting to a back-door tax of hundreds of millions of dollars each year for consumers in Big Ten states.

What's more, at $1.10 for every satellite and cable consumer every month, BTN is asking that all Pennsylvania consumers pay them the second-highest national network — behind only that of ESPN.

According to Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, this is entirely justifiable, helping some institutions "sop up red ink" in their budgets.

As a former president of a public university, I can fully appreciate the challenges of keeping a school's financial ship afloat. But there are serious flaws in his argument.

Indeed, while taxpayers typically are more than willing to pull out their wallets and subsidize a quality education for the state's most promising youths, the imposition of a new fee surcharge on their cable bills to subsidize college sports programs — many of which are well funded — seems to be a stretch.

This is not to suggest that per se, the notion of large public schools and universities teaming with Fox Broadcasting to form a for-profit cable network is necessarily a bad thing. While attorneys may be quick to raise potential antitrust issues with what appears to be this kind of "university cartel" arrangement, I can see some benefits of the Big Ten Network — even if it will largely air the subprime games and sports.

For while these games may not be the bread-and-butter events for most fans, there are enough fans who would be willing to pay to watch them. And this is exactly the argument Delany has made. "There are no second-tier games" in Big Ten country, the commissioner recently retorted, implying that the demand for these "leftovers" still represents a sufficient market for satellite and cable companies to carry the network on their basic tier.

True demand

But here, Delany falls prey to his own logic. For if he really believes in his proposition — that there will be considerable demand for the BTN's much criticized lineup — then he wouldn't out-of-hand reject the compromise put forth by many cable companies to place the new network on a sports tier along with other sports networks such as the NFL Network.

Indeed, that compromise would separate the wheat from the chaff. While protecting from rate hikes those consumers who don't want to pay to see BTN's lineup, a sports tier is perhaps the most effective way of gauging exactly how popular BTN will be with fans. But Delany rejects the challenge, and instead, in an attempt to get consumers to pay hundreds of millions each year for his network, seems to be hiding behind the empty bromide that anything with the Big Ten name on it is worth paying premium fees — even if the content is somewhat hollowed out by pre-existing television deals.

College athletics can magically unite a disparate university community, yet college sports are also big business, and the accompanying financial windfall is often nothing short of addictive. Drunk with the wealth of its television deals with ABC and ESPN, the executives who run the Big Ten seem to be forgetting about both the athletes and their fans who want to see and enjoy the games without feeling like they are being hustled.

This is the opinion of Arthur E. Thomas,
senior manager of leadership at the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington, D.C.
He can be reached at NAFEO, 209 Third Street, SE Washington, DC 20003
or athomas@nafeo.org.
© 2007, St. Cloud Times, all rights reserved

Jim Delany has said that the Big Ten Network is "wedded to basic cable." Hey, I'd like to be wedded to Beyoncé. A man can dream.

You can dress it up any way you like. You can tweak and posture and spin until the cows come home. If you walk like a regional sports network and talk like a regional sports network, guess what? You're a regional sports network. It's time the Big Ten Network started acting like one.

Actually, it's past time. There are four weeks until the start of the football season. The channel is slated to launch in 28 days, and, as of Wednesday morning, only about 30 percent of cable viewers in its target markets will actually see it.

The answer is simple. Painful, but simple. You give up that basic-tier-or-bust demand, and you start the line moving again.

Look. Nobody wins here, least of all the fans. If you're expecting cable companies to cowboy up and do the right thing, we're going to be here until the year 2507.

Is the Big Ten Network cheaper than many regional sports channels that already are on basic tiers? No question. Is it a more appealing, more entertaining option than QVC or C-SPAN? Absolutely. But the reality is also this:

1) When it comes to Big Ten sports, the demand is strictly parochial - folks in Moville aren't going to stop what they're doing to watch, say, Purdue and Northwestern play softball.

2) After football, men's basketball and women's basketball, you're left with dozens of niche events that draw the same kind of ratings as quilting shows. Until poker becomes an Olympic sport, that's not going to change.

Someone here has to bend a little, and precedent says it's not going to be the cable giants. The NFL Network, almost four years young now, is still a rumor to Mediacom subscribers in metro Des Moines. Even in NFL-crazy Kansas City, the area's largest cable provider, Time Warner, doesn't offer the channel. The NFL wants it on one tier. Time Warner wants it on another.

Sound familiar? The parallels are eerily similar. Meanwhile, the stalemate lingers.

If Time Warner can stiff-arm the NFL in Kansas City, Mediacom can do the same to the Big Ten in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.

"I can see these discussions lasting a while," Paul Burmeister says. The former Iowa quarterback has been an anchor on the NFL Network for three years - he'll host the channel's new "College Football Now" show starting Aug. 21. "I thought for sure we would be with some more of the cable providers (by now). But it's a process."

And a painful one, at that. Delany, the Big Ten's commissioner, downplayed media concerns Tuesday in Chicago, declaring that negotiations between the Big Ten Network and major cable providers were "at halftime."

Actually, there's 6 minutes left in the fourth quarter, he's down about three touchdowns, and the clock is ticking. If somebody doesn't throw a Hail Mary, Iowa fans are going to be left in the dark. http://desmoinesregister.com

© 2007, Des Moines Register, all rights reserved

One barometer for classic sports conflict in the Big Ten is Ohio State and Michigan at the Big House in Ann Arbor. But a percolating fight between the conference and Comcast is evolving into a battle that Keith Jackson, in his rumbling baritone, might call one between two "big uglies."

The two powerhouses are headed for a clash over the newly created Big Ten Network, which the conference vows will satiate its universities' fans and alumni as the YES Network has become a TV clubhouse for Yankee fans.

It is, in essence, the Wolverines, the Badgers, the Nittany Lions, the Buckeyes, the Spartans, et al., versus Comcast, which recently won an early court fight against the NFL Network and settled a battle with the MLB Channel, receiving a minority stake in the network partly in exchange for giving millions of its subscribers access to the channel when it starts in 2009.

"We take risks; we want to be competitive," said Jim Delany, the Big Ten commissioner. "It's in the nature of our sports and our institutions."

The Big Ten is one of the largest and strongest conferences in college sports, with 111 years of history, including Jesse Owens sprinting and long jumping for Ohio State; Joe Paterno coaching at Penn State since the Korean War; 14 Heisman Trophy winners; 30 Rose Bowl victories; and 39 appearances by its universities in the Final Four of the N.C.A.A. men's basketball tournament. By carving enough rights to create the Big Ten Network out of a new 10-year, $100 million contract with ESPN and ABC, Delany has bucked the trend to be satisfied only with rights fees from networks and has chosen to extend the conference's brand, expand the reach of its recruiting and build a valuable asset. The channel, which Fox Cable Networks will run and own 49 percent of, will carry 35 football games, 105 men's and 55 women's basketball games, archived games dating from 1960, Olympic sports (the rights to some of which are still owned by CSTV through the 2007-8 season) and 660 hours a year of academic programming.

The dispute over the Big Ten Network, which is to go on the air in August, is typical of the tensions between cable operators and sports networks. The cable operators prefer not to add sports channels, whose costs of acquiring the rights to carry teams are inflated by high player salaries. The Big Ten Network will be paying the conference a $50 million annual rights fee -- not much less than what SNY is paying the Mets or YES is paying the Yankees. Comcast discussed becoming the Big Ten's partner in the network, before Fox entered, but the talks foundered over the cable operator's view of a more limited, less expensive channel than the conference envisioned.

Comcast is developing a campaign that will attempt to prove that the network is too expensive and too provincial to be broadly distributed.

"I have no doubt that the Big Ten will try to rile up their fans and alumni to say that big bad Comcast is denying their content to Big Ten fans and alumni," said David Cohen, an executive vice president of Comcast.

He added, "We'd like to make the network available to those who want to watch it and not force customers who have no interest in the content to have to pay for it."

The argument echoes those raised in previous disputes between cable networks and operators, such as the one Cablevision waged against YES.

"I'm not confident of anything right now," said Delany, who can expect a bruising few months. "All I'll say is I have a hard time seeing many more offerings with more appeal than ours."

The Big Ten Network is a hybrid of a regional sports network and a national one. It lacks the eclecticism and scope of events on ESPN but focuses on the interests of a particular fan constituency. Unlike YES, which carries the Yankees and Nets to a defined market, the Big Ten is devoted to the sports at 11 universities, like a super-regional CSTV or ESPNU.

"It's a national network with a heightened appeal within the eight states, but the level of competition and quality games will give it a national feel," said Mark Silverman, the channel's president.

But the Big Ten's hopes of substantial outer market distribution raise questions about whether there are enough alumni and displaced fans to justify, say, a Gainesville cable system carrying it in a Florida hotbed, or even whether enough Nittany Lions fans care enough in the Northeast.

"I can't speak to Pocatello, Idaho, but I can to Phoenix, Southern California and New York, where we have a lot of alumni," Delany said.

Silverman said the network had balanced the interest in Big Ten sports inside and outside its region by seeking a monthly subscriber fee of $1.10 to be carried as an expanded basic channel to 18.5 million cable subscribers in the conference's states, but 10 cents a subscriber everywhere else.

"We think the pricing is compelling," Silverman said.

But Comcast, with 5.7 million subscribers in the eight states with Big Ten universities, does not. Its position is that the Big Ten Network's cost is far too high -- the only national channel priced higher is ESPN, at nearly $3 a subscriber, according to the industry research firm SNL Kagan -- and would be carried only on its digital sports tier, which requires an extra monthly fee. A state court in New York ruled last month that Comcast could banish the NFL Network to that tier. The decision is on appeal.

Cohen, a blunt executive who served as the chief of staff to Philadelphia's mayor in the 1990's, Edward G. Rendell, said the offer to place the network on the sports tier was not an opening gambit or a negotiating ploy.

As for carrying the network in non-Big Ten markets at 10 cents a subscriber, he said Comcast would most likely make it available as a subscription service like Major League Baseball's Extra Innings out-of-market package.

"They have a right to do as they wish," Silverman said.

A spokesman for Time Warner Cable, with the second-most subscribers in Big Ten markets, said its position was similar to Comcast's.

If Comcast's view prevails, it will impede the Big Ten Network's earning potential because digital sports tiers are not purchased widely by customers. But if all the subscribers in the eight states got the channel on expanded basic at $1.10 a subscriber, the revenues would add up to $237.6 million, more than any regional sports network's except YES, which generated $277.2 million from subscribers in 2006, SNL Kagan estimated.

That figure does not count what the Big Ten is getting from DirecTV, which will carry the channel to its nearly 16 million satellite subscribers.

Comcast's resistance to the Big Ten Network's proposed price would evidently be reduced if the channel had rights to the best possible games. But in football, particularly, ABC always gets first choice. The Big Ten will have second choice in 3 of 12 weeks, the third selection after ESPN in three other weeks and the fourth choice after ESPN2 in the other six weeks. The Big Ten will choose its men's basketball games after CBS Sports.

Cohen called it "second- and third-choice games with the first-choice games available on broadcast and cable networks already on our systems." Delany said the question of his network's lacking top-quality games sounded like negotiation spin.

"The value of what we're doing is not in one game," he said, "but we're selling a football schedule, a basketball schedule, Olympic sports, classics, video-on-demand and university programming."

Comcast's position on the Big Ten Network is also partly a warning to other conferences not to expect broad distribution if they create similar channels. The Big 12 had been analyzing one until it made its new eight-year, $480-million deal with ESPN, but the Southeastern, Pacific-10 and Atlantic Coast Conferences have voiced various levels of interest in such ventures.

What Cohen insisted was at stake "is the Big Ten and any other major sports conference going against the consuming public."

He estimated that five conference networks, priced similarly to the Big Ten, would eventually cost cable subscribers $1.58 billion in additional fees.

Correction: June 20, 2007, Wednesday A sports article Monday about tense negotiations over the Big Ten Network's placement on cable systems misstated the financial terms of a new 10-year contract that the Big Ten has with ESPN and ABC. It is worth $1 billion, or an average of $100 million a year -- not a total of $100 million.

© 2007, New York Times, all rights reserved

Sports fans used to believe it was an honor to watch their favorite teams on television.

College football fans often watched their alma mater play on television once or twice a year, maybe even a third if it reached a prestigious bowl game. That was before Oklahoma's board of regents successfully sued the NCAA in 1984 which allowed individual conferences and schools to pursue their own television deals.

Now, college and professional sports leagues have taken viewing habits to another level. In recent and coming years, cable choices have included or will include the NFL Network, the Big Ten Network, NBATV and MLBTV.

You can bet SECTV and the Big 12 Network are around the corner. It's not even unfathomable to see an Iowa Preps Network coming to a provider near you.

The market is so saturated with sports, the roof eventually will cave. That roof, unfortunately for consumers, is a person's wallet.

It's a never-ending cycle of fights between sporting networks and cable companies.

Of course money is the primary factor. Big Ten officials want cable companies to carry their network on a basic tier, not a sports or digital tier.

Network officials proclaim they want consumers to access their programming without paying a "cable tax," to watch their network on a digital or sports tier.

The real reason? The networks count all potential viewers as subscribers which allows them to charge higher advertising rates. Therefore if only 3 million cable or satellite subscribers have access to the Big Ten Network on a tier instead of 20 million on basic cable, ad rates - and profits - dwindle dramatically.

Cable companies, rightfully so, have fought against some networks' demands. Niche networks are the bane of cable companies, often loaded with low relevance and high cost to a majority of customers. Sports fans - including myself - may demand the NFL Network or switch providers. Most people reading this column could not care less about "Ace of Cakes," but if The Food Network was pulled by our cable provider you can bet our household would find another who carries it.

The Big Ten Network presents a double-edged sword for viewers and cable companies. The Big Ten is not blameless for this tussle.

Games that formerly appeared on free, over-the-air networks via ESPN-Plus now are relegated to the Big Ten Network on cable. But many more Big Ten games of all sports will be televised, which makes turning down the network financial suicide for a cable company like Mediacom. Can you honestly imagine Iowa's Mediacom viewers not watching the Hawkeyes' home football opener against Syracuse in primetime?

At $1.10 per subscriber in the Big Ten's eight-state region, the Big Ten Network will cost more than established networks like CNN, TBS, TNT and USA. That cost will trickle down to the customer. Most Big Ten sports fans are willing to pay it for football and men's basketball games. The question for viewers, cable companies and league officials begins with the value of other programming.

During a teleconference last week, Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany lashed out at Comcast executive David Cohen, who called much of the network's broadcasting "second- tier" in a press release.

From a national and factual perspective, Cohen's right.

The network won't have the first choice in football and often will have the third choice. But if you want to watch only Iowa's game, then that's your first choice.

Delany also blasted Comcast for "disparaging" remarks about how Indiana basketball fans won't want to watch Iowa's women's volleyball team. That's politically incorrect but true. Olympic sports programs at Big Ten institutions struggle to make any money, and they're not going to generate any more on television. Advertisers are reluctant to support the sports, and cable companies don't want to pay top dollar for a channel whose ratings compare to NHL.

Does that make those sports unimportant? Absolutely not. But profits speak louder than rhetoric, and since the Big Ten Network has elevated the conversation into a financial argument, it's all about the Benjamins.

Eventually yours and mine.

© 2007, Cedar Rapids Gazette, all rights reserved