ALTITUDE

fees and everything that goes into a regional sports network and what makes business viable. A 50 percent cut in rates and going to 20 percent of the subscriber base is not a viable business. You would hope that there is a reasonable deal. Fair is not putting a company out of business.”

In a statement to The Denver Post on Sunday, Comcast said: “We are disappointed that Altitude has chosen to pull its channel from our customers, and we no longer have the rights to carry Altitude’s content. For years, Altitude has demanded significant annual price increases for the same content, which has driven up costs for all of our customers in Colorado and Utah, even though most customers do not watch the channel. We have been negotiating in good faith with Altitude and want to reach an agreement with the network, but it must be at a reasonable price.”

At issue is the distributors’ insistence that Altitude isn’t widely watched by their subscriber base, thus making the carriage cost an unfair burden on the majority of their customers.

Comcast said that over the last year more than 95 percent of their customers watched less than the equivalent of one game per week.

“I don’t know where that number comes from,” Miller said late last week. “I don’t know how their math worked on that.”

“There’s obviously in our brave new world a whole bunch of options to look into distribution, which everybody has,” Miller said. “We’ve had a tremendous relationship on the business side and the community side with our distributors. … It’s always been preferable when you’ve had a good partner like that to do business with them. There wasn’t an aggressive, ‘Hey, we’re going to explore YouTube and Amazon and Twitter and all these companies that are getting into the distribution of sports rights.’ ”