Sports Programming on Satellite TV

One of the great things about modern cable and satellite TV is the explosion of sports programming now available to customers across the country. Specialized sports packages like ESPN Gameplan give the customer access to nearly 20 college football games every weekend.

Content is king today, and as the saying goes the sports networks want to bring as much sports content as possible to the end user so they can sell more ads. Quite a few brand new all-sports networks have sprung up in the last few years. A few of the new networks are Altitude Sports, which carries NBA Nuggets and the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche games, and also the Big Ten Network and the Mtn, the broadcast home of the Mountain West conference.

Certainly these new channels are nice for fans in certain areas, disputes between the providers of sports programming and cable networks that deliver the content have resulted in trouble at times to the customer. For example, the Big Ten Network began broadcasting in 2007, but the network was in a carraige dispute with big cable provider Time Warner. Customers of Time Warner in Illinois were not able to watch some of the local teams play due to this dispute. Fortunately, the companies involved came to terms before the fall football season, so customers could remain with with Time Warner rather than having to switch to one of the satellite television providers such as DISH Network or DirecTV.

Specialized sports packages are another issue to deal with for the customer. Many Comcast customers have switched to DirecTV because the NFL Sunday ticket is exlusively on satellite. This has upset some Comcast and DISH Network customers, who do not understand why a package Sunday Ticket isn’t available to every provider. Other packages though are more fan friendly, like the NHL Center Ice and the NBA League Pass, which are available on almost every cable TV and satellite company.

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