While Thursday night’s game between the New England Patriots and the New York Jets on NFL Network will also be broadcast by a local station in Boston, Patriot fans in other New England towns will have to get satellite or go to a bar to see the game, the Wall Street Journal reports. By defining the home market narrowly, the NFL is hoping to pressure cable operators to distribute the NFL Network more broadly, the paper says.
—Jon Lafayette
Some Patriots Fans in Dark With Game on NFL Net
Nov 12, 2008 • Post A Comment
It’s a shame that the NFL, one of the richest, most successful sports enterprises ever, feels compelled to try to extort even more money from fans by withholding its product from them. This ploy by the NFL Network is an appalling money grab, pure and simple. In the “good old days,” simply airing games on major broadcast channels in their appropriate markets and reaping the ad revenues was more than enough to satisfy everyone’s greed. How they hope to establish their network by taking such an adversarial stance toward their own fans is a mystery to me. Personally, I would never pay an extra ten dollars a month for a sports tier I don’t need just to get one extra NFL game per week, a game I lived five decades without needing before.