Even when trying to play the victim role, Cablevision Systems Corp. always seems to don the black hat. Take the recent dust-up over OLN blacking out NHL games on Cablevision because the network is carried only on a sports tier. You’d think there’d be plenty of sympathy for Cablevision and anger at OLN and the league for shutting out fans.
But Cablevision wasted no time in putting out a blatantly misleading print ad, encouraging customers to buy the sports tier to get NHL games, despite being told by OLN unequivocally that the games would be blacked out.
Last Monday, Cablevision ran ads in several New York newspapers saying, “Hockey’s back, and we’ve got it covered … For just $4.95 a month, you get 10 exciting networks. … Plus, exciting NHL action all season long on OLN.”
This came after multiple published reports said the games would be blacked out, and warnings by OLN and Comcast to that effect.
When the games were indeed blacked out, Cablevision released a statement saying, “We are surprised and disappointed that OLN, and its parent company Comcast, are denying our customers programming they are entitled to receive under our current agreement to carry the network.”
Surprised? Only if they hadn’t been reading the papers or taking any phone calls for the last month.
Cablevision did not comment past the statement.
There are lots of great sideplots with this issue, with the NHL caught between Comcast, its new television rights holder and owner of the Philadelphia Flyers, and Cablevision, which owns the New York Rangers. Cablevision CEO James Dolan, an NHL governor, actually voted for the OLN deal.
From the cable industry standpoint, it’s an interesting test case to see whether OLN can leverage blackouts into broader distribution. There were hints last week that it might have some success with Dish Network, which has OLN on a tier that reaches about 30 percent of its customers, short of the 40 percent threshold OLN is mandating to receive the NHL games.
Cablevision’s misleading print ad will only be a small piece of a puzzle that eventually might be decided in court, a familiar place for Cablevision and Dolan when it comes to sports tiffs (YES Network, the Mets, the Jets stadium, you lose count after awhile).
But the ad was so brazen, so shameless in its attempt to get consumers to pay for something the company knew it couldn’t deliver (at least not at that point), that it warrants a second look.
That actually may be what Cablevision wants. It’s probably not a subscriber’s $5-a-month fee. The sports tier has only 22,000 customers and is more a place to park unwanted networks than a tool to drive revenue. Instead, Cablevision is trying to draw as much attention to the OLN blackout as possible. You’d think it would come up with a better way.
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| Complex hockey hero Bobby Hull will be the subject of a new ESPN movie. |
BOBBY HULL MOVIE: Chicago-based television production firm Intersport is getting into the sports movie business, teaming with Orly Adelson Productions for a TV biopic on complex hometown hockey hero Bobby Hull.
ESPN Original Entertainment has green-lighted the development of the project, meaning it has funded the writing of the script.
Intersport CEO Charlie Besser said his company has wanted to get into the movie business for some time, but also was drawn by the potential of the story itself.
Intersport was involved in several non-sports film projects a few years ago that never made it out of development. Orly Adelson Productions is the lead outside producer for EOE, with the dramatic series “Playmakers.”
Andy Bernstein can be reached at abernstein@sportsbusinessjournal.com.
