Hey NFL, greed isn't good
by PHIL MUSHNICK, New York Post
But by gifting the game to itself, the NFL has made Packers-Cowboys available to roughly 33 percent of the nation's TV homes.
The NFL is now left to blame those big, bad, arrogant cable systems - Cablevision, Time-Warner, Comcast - for not clearing the NFL Network on expanded basic. Yes, those systems are big, bad and arrogant; they've never cut anyone a break.
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But in this case, the NFL was just as big, as bad and as arrogant. It felt that the mere title, the NFL Network, and the self-assignment of eight exclusive game telecasts would make cable clearance a tap-in, and presto! the league had invented for itself another huge source of revenue, even if there was no good reason - beyond greed - to leverage its own games.
The NFL had a near-future vision for itself - its own gravy train TV network. All it had to do was dangle some live games, games that otherwise would have appeared on free, network TV. And now, because the NFL overplayed its hand, preventing two-thirds of the country from seeing NFLN games, the cable giants are the bad guys?
Well, they are bad guys, and when the NFL offers them an ownership stake in the NFL Network everything will be resolved because the cable TV industry always has run on conflicts of interest. That's when cable and the NFL will team up, the NFL Network will be cleared on expanded basic, and suddenly neither partner will care what it might cost those poor cable subscribers who have no interest in football.
But for now the victim of cable - the NFL Network - is just as big and as ugly as the perpetrator.
Many millions more people would have been able to watch, in NFL Week 13, the Packers-Cowboys - and watch it for free, no less - had there been no NFL Network. How does that make cable the only bad guy or even the worse of two bad guys?
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