Tennis Channel has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to "take up the legal question of whether Comcast should make Tennis' 24-hour sports channel available to nearly all Comcast TV subscribers," according to Bob Fernandez of the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER. Tennis Channel alleges that Comcast "is discriminating against it or treating it differently from the Comcast-owned Golf Channel by asking subscribers to pay $5 more a month for it," while not asking "for a similar fee for Golf Channel." Comcast lawyers claim that the government "cannot tell the cable-TV giant how to distribute entertainment content to its subscribers and that the Tennis Channel would add costs to subscriber monthly bills." Tennis Channel is in about 35 million U.S. homes, "many of them satellite-TV providers that own part of the channel." Golf Channel "is distributed to most of Comcast's 21.6 million cable-TV subscribers." Previous reports show that Tennis Channel is "available to about three million Comcast viewers who pay the fee" (PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, 12/10).
