Sports Broadcasting Law– In November 2006, former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, (R – PA) proposed legislation to repeal the NFL’s antitrust exemption under the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.
The spectrum concern is based on the National Football League’s NFL Network, which is available in a limited number of houses, compared to the other NFL broadcasters.
For the 2006–07 NFL season, each NFL team annually earned more than $120 million in television share money. League officials negotiated various deals with CBS, NBC, Fox, and Disney, ending up with a six-year (later expanded to eight), $24 billion cable and broadcast rights deal.
The TV deals ended in 2013. In addition, DirecTVit paid $700 million each year through 2010 for its Sunday Ticket package. The NFL also decided to keep an internal package of eight games from Thursday to Saturday nights, placing it on its NFL Network.
Both the Sunday Ticket and the NFL Network became topics of interest for Spectre.
Comcast’s versus network tried to bid on the eight-game package the NFL gave its own network, but lost.
NFL Network’s high per-subscriber fees charged to cable companies force cable companies to offer the channel as a premium-tier network.
This, according to the NFL, is unacceptable and they required their channel to be placed at a basic tier, compared to the higher priced sports tiers.
In doing so, cable companies would have to reduce the number of basic channels or increase the basic cable package rate to meet the NFL’s request. However, NFL rules require that NFL games shown on cable channels (including the NFL Network) be 해외축구중계 on a television station in participating team markets (subject to team blackouts). Locally when necessary).
The other big concern is the lack of availability of NFL Sunday Ticket, severely restricting it through its exclusivity with DirecTV.
A similar situation occurs with NASCAR Hot Pass, which went from the cable companies to DirecTV in 2007, and was thwarted by Major League Baseball’s MLB Extra Innings, which MLB tried to push to DirecTV exclusively starting in 2009, but was stopped by threats of the legislators.
In what may have been a goodwill gesture to Senator Lautenberg of New Jersey and
In an effort to influence Spectre, the NFL gave Time Warner and Cablevision subscribers a free week of programming between December 24 and December 30, 2006.
Time allowed subscribers to tune in to the Rutgers-Kansas State Texas Bowl matchup and another college bowl game with Minnesota and Texas Tech.
Lautenberg had complained that many Rutgers fans in New Jersey were was unfairly denying them the opportunity to see Rutgers at the Texas Bowl because the NFL Network, which owns the rights to the game, had not yet made deals with Cablevision and Time Warner Cable.
