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The other war
: Forgot to mention earlier that Tom Rogers, former head of Primedia, told me that he was asked by Mayor Bloomberg to mediate the fight between the Yankees’ YES network and Cablevision. Now that’s a war.
(I side with Cablevision on this one. They don’t want to give it to everybody and charge everybody. I don’t watch baseball and so I don’t want to pay a penny for the channel.)
Being a Cablevision customer, I’m not so sure I buy this argument on their part – they carry a lot of channels that I have to pay for but don’t watch. I’m not particularly interested in sports at all, but I still have to pay for ESPN. And despite my not speaking Spanish I’m still paying for Telemundo. I think it has far more to do with their being a competitor (Knicks, MSG) than it does with a sudden outbreak of responsiveness on their part. Otherwise we’d already have TCM.
My cable company (RCN) didn’t change the rates when we got YES and Time-Warner Manhattan (my old cable company) did the same.
Cablevision had the Yankees and the Nets on their owned sports channel before George decided to keep all the money for himself. No word on what they charged other cable outlets for the rights to have MSG. They’re just ticked George took it private.