Ogie Oglethorpe wrote:
It looks like the channel may be dead out of the gate. For this channel to survive, they needed a winter partner and with the Blackhawks extending with NBCSCH, they will not have one. Clearly there is no way a Reinsdorf owned Bulls will join them.
No, the Cubs really needed to work that McDonough connection to get the Hawks for the winter. The Mets and SNY seem to get by without major-league winter programming, I think they just pick up spare UConn games and stuff, but that's a much bigger regional market, of course. (It's an interesting situation out there: MSG inherited the Islanders' mammoth TV deal and then snatched up the Devils basically to spite SNY and YES, but then often has nowhere to put one or both.) I'm still not bullish on the long-term future of SNY.
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Here is a question I will pose to the board, will the Cubs end up in a situation like the Dodgers where the largest TV provider in market will not pick up their channel? I have a hard time believing that Comcast will add a competing regional sports channel to their line-up, which if added would require additional subscriber fees that they either eat or pass on to their customers.
I can't say they will definitely end up in the Dodgers' situation, but they really seem to be on that path.
Fur Coat's hypothesis that Sinclair needed WGN to make the RSN deal work is an interesting one.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.