How baseball learned from football’s mistake and pulled off the biggest cable launch ever.
By Paul Smalera for The Big Money
For the past couple of weeks, Comcast (CMCSA) cable customers have been receiving a message on their TV sets from the ghost in the machine known as the cable executive. The message tells them that the NFL Network will disappear from their service starting May 1. Nothing unusual about that: Every few months, most cable companies go through a refresh; channels move, marginal ones are dropped, and some lineup additions are made. So why is Comcast breaking out the trumpets for the dropping of a single-sport channel during the offseason? In a word, baseball.
For four years, the league-owned network has been battling to get into the living rooms of an America increasingly enamored with its bone-rattling game. But the network is continually forced to guard its flank from cable companies who hate carrying the pricey network. Rather than clamor for the channel, (which is, after all, dedicated to America’s most popular sport), every major cable network has balked, playing a game the NFL isn’t used to: hardball.
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