A highly frustrating experience for many sports fans is having the channel a game airs on, but still being unable to watch it thanks to specific blackouts. Often, that’s about blackouts of a national feed of a game to try and force people to a regional sports network (but, often, the RSN in question isn’t available in the area or on the provider). But what’s going on between Comcast and the Big Ten’s four new West Coast schools (Washington, Oregon, USC, and UCLA) is a strange reversal of that, and is particularly odd considering the provider’s other ties to the conference.
There, Comcast subscribers in those schools’ areas who get the Big Ten Network are being blocked from watching games with those schools (and only those schools). That’s reportedly over Comcast declining to pay higher in-market rates after those schools’ conference realignment moves. But those subscribers can still watch other, non-local schools on BTN. Here’s how the error message in question looked for people trying to watch Washington’s men’s soccer game against Oregon State Monday (which saw the Huskies knock off the No. 4 Beavers ).
The referenced AllBTNGames.com is a site from the network (actually, as shown at the bottom, from its 61 percent majority owner Fox) that’s pretty standard for carriage disputes, putting the blame on Comcast, providing a zip code checker to see if customers are affected, and suggesting they “take action now!” by calling Comcast or subscribing to email updates. Along similar lines, a network spokesperson sent out a statement blaming Comcast. Here’s that, via Jon Wilner of the (San Jose) Mercury News :
“The Big Ten Network is proud to present an expanded slate of live sporting events featuring the newest members of the B1G conference, however most Comcast subscribers will not see these games.
“As the one distribution partner that declined to expand along with us, Comcast Xfinity viewers in many areas will not have access to live broadcasts of the highly anticipated inaugural B1G season games for Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington.
“If you are an Xfinity subscriber and cannot find the Ducks, Huskies, Bruins or Trojans on the Big Ten Network in your area, please contact 1-800-Comcast or go to ALLBTNGAMES.com.”
What’s going on here? Well, distributors like Comcast typically have one “out-of-market” per-subscriber rate for conference networks in particular, and another, much-higher, “in-market” rate. The specifics for how those markets work are often hotly negotiated; sometimes they’re the whole state, other times (like in this case), only certain zip codes. The actual dollar amount gets negotiated too, as does the tier the network is placed on (basic, expanded basic, or in a premium sports package) for in-market and out-of-market subscribers.
When schools flip conference alignment, that changes things for those networks. Adding schools in populous markets can be “ certainly advantageous ” for the networks, as ESPN/ACC Network’s Jeramy Michiaels told AA recently. And that was cited as a particularly important key to some past realignment, with former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany last year even admitting the 2014 additions of Rutgers and Maryland were “ a great network play ” (as many had long argued was the key rationale), even with him still citing geographic expansion as more important still. But those kinds of boosts to in-market status only work if distributors agree.
In the case of these particular West Coast schools, the BTN statement suggests every other distributor has been on board with flipping them to in-market with “declined to expand along with us” (although it isn’t explicitly spelled out if those other distributors gave them full in-market rates and tiers similar to what they have elsewhere for these new schools, or if they reached some level of compromise).
But it’s clear that Comcast (the top national distributor, with 13.6 million subscribers at the end of Q4 2023 ) has not agreed to whatever the deal in question is. And, interestingly enough, a Comcast representative told John Canzano earlier this summer that these games would be available for subscribers on the sports tier, as Canzano referenced in a new piece on this Tuesday :
I reached out to Comcast in early summer to determine how fans of the four new Big Ten schools might tune into football games on the Big Ten Network this season.
A Seattle-based executive at Comcast Xfinity was happy to help. Andy Colley provided the blueprint for customers in June but it came with a $10 upcharge.
Wrote Colley:
“The Big Ten Network is offered on our More Sports and Entertainment tier and can be added to our Xfinity Popular plan for $10 a month. Not only does the Big Ten Network cover college football for Oregon and Washington, but it also includes NFL Network, FanDuel TV, ESPN News, CBS Sports Network, NBA TV, NFL RedZone, NHL Network, MLB Network, PAC-12 Mountain, CMT, TCM, and FM. The Xfinity Popular Package is $60 a month.”
Customers in the region reached into their pockets for the extra $10. But it turns out that things aren’t that simple. A Washington women’s soccer game on Monday night, for example, was blacked out on Xfinity in the Pacific Northwest. And if nothing changes between now and Saturday, Xfinity customers won’t be able to see Oregon and Washington play their first Big Ten football games, either.
Canzano’s piece also adds that a key issue here appears to be the tier:
“I’m told by sources that the distribution issue is rooted in a “territorial rights” debate. The Big Ten Network believes that live games should be part of the basic-tier package. Xfinity wants to charge the $10 upgrade.”
Part of what makes this so odd, though, is that Comcast is in other ways very on board with the Big Ten. They’re the parent of NBCUniversal, one of the conference’s giant media partners (for both NBC and Peacock games ), and they also were the sponsor of NBC’s halftime show for Big Ten games. Granted, this is partly them fighting with BTN majority owner Fox rather than the conference, and their cable distribution side is theoretically separate from their NBCU broadcasting side, but it is unusual to see a company that is boosting the Big Ten through one of its divisions fighting with them through another one.
We’ll see where this goes from here. The football season hasn’t yet started for these schools (none played in Week 0), and a lot of disputes get worked out before a kickoff takes place. Others get worked out ahead of crucial games. And this dispute is a long ways from as protracted as the ones that dogged these schools with the Pac-12 Networks (which did not have a distribution partner like Fox, and never wound up on DirecTV). But still, it’s certainly unfortunate at the least for Big Ten fans in these areas who did pay the sports tier upcharge to not get the content they presumably most want, live games from their local schools.
[ John Canzano ]
The post Big Ten Network-Comcast dispute may see West Coast schools’ games blacked out appeared first on Awful Announcing .
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