N. Y. Yankees fans strike out
Comcast has dropped the channel that broadcasts the team’s games from its lineup.
New York Yankees fans soon might get a taste of the Dodger blues.
Baseball fans in 900,000 homes in New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania that receive TV service from Comcast Corp. could miss the start of the baseball season for their favorite team due to an increasingly contentious dispute.
The fracas playing out in New York is familiar to thousands of Los Angeles Dodgers fans in Southern California who next month are likely to begin a third baseball season without the Los Angeles Dodgers’ TV channel available in a majority of homes in the region. Several pay- TV operators. including DirecTV, have refused to carry the channel, citing its high cost.
A similar dispute involving Comcast is playing out on the East Coast. Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox acquired 80% of the YES Network in 2014. The Yankees’ organization retained 20%.
Comcast had carried the YES Network for more than a decade, but the cable provider abruptly dropped the channel from its lineup in mid- November after the end of the last baseball season.
“The price Fox and the Yankees are requiring from our customers is not acceptable given the network’s minimal viewership, which is why we decided that we could no longer justify carrying the network,” Comcast spokesman John Demming said in a statement.
YES Network and the Dodgers channel, SportsNet LA, are the two most expensive regional sports channels in the U. S., according to consulting firm SNL Kagan.
YES Network is the most expensive, offered to pay- TV operators, including Comcast, at about $ 5.30 a month per subscriber home, SNL Kagan data shows. The Dodgers channel is slightly less, offered for about $ 5 a month per subscriber home.
Fox now is crying foul. The company notes that Comcast paid the market rate for the channel throughout the 2015 season even though the two companies did not have a signed carriage agreement. The two sides had tentatively agreed on terms of a deal in early 2015 when the previous carriage agreement expired. Fox executives are incensed that Comcast pulled the plug when they thought they had a deal.
Fox on Wednesday blanketed metropolitan New York with TV, radio, billboards and print advertisements that encourage Yankees fans to cancel their Comcast service and instead sign up for TV service from DirecTV or Verizon FiOS, which carry YES Network.
“The Yankees are a special team and they have loyal fans, and we thought it was our duty to tell people that they need to switch,” said Tracy Dolgin, chief executive of YES Network.
Dolgin insisted that price was not the sticking point in the dispute, unlike the issue in Los Angeles. Other major providers in the New York region are carrying YES Network, which launched in 2002, and Fox and Comcast, he said, got hung up on contract language.
“It’s clear that it is not that the price is too high,” Dolgin said.
The politics were differ- ent a year ago when Comcast and Fox reached the tentative agreement. At the time, Comcast was planning to acquire Time Warner Cable — a major TV distributor in New York City — and Comcast needed the blessing of federal and New York regulators.
But the federal government blocked the Comcast- Time Warner Cable merger. Instead of becoming the largest pay- TV provider in New York, Comcast remained the fourth- largest provider, concentrating on communities in Connecticut and New Jersey. The company decided the Yankees channel wasn’t essential.
The YES Network- Comcast dispute represents another skirmish in TV landscape as pay- TV providers push back on the rising cost of sports channels. In the past, most providers, including Comcast, swallowed the fees because they didn’t want to alienate sports fans. Now pay- TV operators are more concerned about losing customers who are not hard- core sports fans. Customers are tired of paying increasingly higher cable bills and they are threatening to dump their subscriptions in favor of low- cost Internet streaming options.
Comcast continues to carry a competing channel that broadcasts New York Mets games. Comcast has an ownership stake in that channel. ( SNL Kagan data show that the monthly fee for that channel is roughly half that of YES Network).