NFL Hill Lobbying on Cable Dispute May Have Backfired
NFL lobbying for FCC intervention in a carriage dispute may have backfired, industry sources said: Many in Congress became sympathetic to cable operators and asked the league to allow a big game to be aired widely. The NFL’s announcement late Wednesday that it will let CBS and NBC carry an NFL Network feed of a game between the New England Patriots and New York Giants (CD Dec 27 p8) came in part because of congressional pressure on the league, they said. A spokesman for the NFL Network said it’s putting the game on broadcast TV because Cablevision and Time Warner Cable won’t carry it and Comcast doesn’t distribute the network widely. The network said it plans to continue lobbying.
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The decision to put the game on CBS and NBC came two days after Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., threatened to ask the Commerce Committee he sits on to hold hearings on the matter. “For a game of this significance to be used as a bargaining chip or point of leverage between corporations locked in a dispute would say a great deal about the esteem in which America’s football fans are held by the big interests,” he wrote NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell on Monday. “Under the unfortunate circumstance that this matter remains unresolved,” Kerry said he would ask the committee to examine “how the emergence of premium sports channels” affects consumers. He sent copies of the letter to Comcast President Brian Roberts and Time Warner Cable President Glenn Britt.
Comcast carries the network on a sports tier, but Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, company officials said. The NFL’s putting the game on over-the-air TV reflected one solution that Britt had offered. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and ranking member Arlen Specter, R-Pa., asked Goodell Dec. 19 to make the Giants- Patriots and other games “more broadly available than just on the NFL Channel.” NFL Network lobbying paid some dividends: 21 members of Congress wrote FCC Chairman Kevin Martin asking him to make carriage disputes such as the network’s subject to arbitration or mediation.
The NFL’s Capitol Hill overtures may have helped cable operators persuade lawmakers that government intervention wasn’t needed, industry sources said. The network was the first to call Hill attention to cable carriage, an industry official said. But that didn’t pay off, the source said: Many in Congress resisted demands to intervene for the league. Analysts agreed. Martin put language in an FCC order on leased access to allow arbitration in carriage disputes but killed it when other commissioners balked (CD Special Bulletin Nov 28 p1).
“Whenever you ask government to intervene, it’s always more than a little dicey as to what result that you would get,” said Free State Foundation President Randolph May. “Ultimately more people on the Hill recognized… this was a situation in which government intervention was not called for.” Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett agreed that NFL lobbying “may have backfired a bit.” Specter, Kerry and other legislators “were inevitably reluctant to try to force binding arbitration for what should otherwise be a straightforward business negotiation,” Moffett said. “The cable operators held their ground and the NFL Network blinked first.”
The deal with CBS and NBC wasn’t spurred by political or business considerations, the NFL network said. After the Patriots preserved their perfect record by winning Sunday, the network asked CBS and NBC if they wanted to air Saturday’s game, the channel’s spokesman said. Earlier, the broadcast networks had offered to do that, he added. Their interest shows not only professional football’s popularity but also that cable operators favor their own sports content by widely carrying networks like Comcast’s Versus but not the NFL Network, he said. “We held out hope that we would get an agreement among existing cable providers until” Tuesday, said the spokesman. A CBS spokesman said the network gets to air commercials it sells in local ad inserts during its simulcast of the NFL Network’s game coverage. CBS CEO Leslie Moonves spoke with Goodell and other NFL officials about broadcasting the game, the spokesman said. An NBC sports official didn’t return messages seeking comment.
Cable used lobbyists “to keep us at bay,” the NFL Network spokesman said. “These guys are too powerful and are doing nothing but stonewalling” by not entering carriage talks, he added. A threat of FCC-required arbitration may end the impasse, he said, citing Comcast’s decision to carry the America Channel after the agency moved in that direction. NFL Network lobbying, which dates from January, is “just beginning,” said the official. “We'll be in all 50 states and we'll continue federally and in every state to ensure someone properly addresses the double standard of big cable.”