Media Notes
CABLEFAX DAILY reports Comcast is “laying off the majority of the 300 employees at its CN8 regional net.” The net will “no longer be available in the Boston market,” and will be re-branded “The Comcast Network,” becoming two local nets serving DC and Philadelphia. CN8 now will report to Comcast SportsNet rather than the MSO’s Eastern division, and the net plans to offer “more targeted public affairs and sports programming” (CABLEFAX DAILY, 11/7).
PAC ATTACK: In L.A., Diane Pucin reports only 18% of the country will see Saturday’s USC-California college football game on ABC at 8:00pm ET, while the rest of the country will get Oklahoma State-Texas Tech. Pac-10 Associate Commissioner Jim Muldoon said that conference games that are part of the ABC split-coverage packages “will get anywhere from 18% to 30% national exposure but that it can’t get much lower than 18%.” Muldoon: “We’d prefer 100% of course, but I think Texas Tech is becoming a great story” (L.A. TIMES, 11/7).
AS GOOD AS IT GETS: The WALL STREET JOURNAL’s Nando Di Fino profiles Mock GM, a fantasy basketball game developed by Newark resident Ngozika Nwaneri in which owners “can’t just arbitrarily pick up and drop free agents.” Instead, salary caps “restrict their rosters.” Also, player contracts are “negotiated by fantasy players acting as agents within the game.” De Fino wrote Nwaneri has "created a game that more closely simulates the management of a team than anything before it (WSJ.com, 11/6).
NOTES: FSN Southwest PR Dir Ramon Alvarez said that four cable systems, representing “more than 100,000 subscribers,” have decided “not to pay an additional fee" to the net to carry FS Oklahoma's Thunder telecasts. Suddenlink, with 74,000 subscribers, is the “biggest system” not to carry the games (DAILY OKLAHOMAN, 11/7)....ESPN's feed of the Maryland-Virginia Tech college football game Thursday night on Time Warner Cable in the Charlotte area was interrupted for nearly 30 minutes after the net began airing a feed from the Food Network (THE DAILY).
|
