YES may have #s in Yankees face-off

YES may have #s
in Yankees face-off

Report: Fans scooting Cablevision for satellite

By Jeff Bercovici

    With the new major league baseball season getting underway in just seven days, millions of fans in the country's biggest TV market still don't know whether they’ll be able to watch their hometown team play most of its games.
    Fortunately for them, the most entertaining sporting contest of the year is playing out not on the baseball diamond but in the business press. It's the standoff between Cablevision, the New York metropolitan area's largest cable provider, and YES, the new regional sports network owned by the New York Yankees.
    It's a contest of wills and of PR, and with each side publicly encouraging irate Yankees fans to blame their frustration on the other party.
    It's also a contest of numbers, and in that regard YES might be gaining the upper hand, with signs now emerging that Cablevision's reluctance to deal may be costing it subscribers.
     Briefly: YES, which will carry 130 regular-season Yankees games this year, wants Cablevision to carry it as a basic channel.
     Cablevision wants to offer YES as a premium subscription channel.
     In an attempt to force the issue, YES has been running print and radio ads letting consumers know they can get the new network immediately by switching their cable service from Cablevision to DirecTV, the Hughes-owned satellite provider.
    A Cablevision spokesman says this tactic has resulted in "minimal defections," but numbers released last week by DirecTV suggest otherwise.
    In a filing, DirecTV revised the number of new subscribers it expects to add upwards by about 50 percent, from a previous estimate of 200,000-225,000 to a new estimate of 325,000.
      How much of that has to do with the Cablevision-YES deadlock is unclear, but it may become more clear in the next week as panicky Yankees fans switch over their service in time for opening day.
      Thus far, Cablevision has taken the stance that it is protecting its customers by refusing the terms offered by YES, which wants a fee of about $2 per subscriber.
    Cablevision says it would have to pass the cost along to all of its customers regardless of whether they want the extra programming or not. Instead, it wants to offer YES as a premium channel at an undisclosed cost, probably around $10 per month.
    But it's an awkward time for Cablevision to be taking a stand. Among its properties is the Madison Square Garden Network, which carried Yankees games last year. MSG also owns the NBA's New York Knicks and the NHL's New York Rangers.
    Neither team looks likely to make the playoffs this year, meaning MSG -- and Cablevision -- will miss out on the copious ad revenue playoff games generate.
      But if Cablevision's back is against the wall, so is YankeeNets, the company that owns both the Yankees and 60 percent of YES. If YES isn't in Cablevision's 3 million homes, it will have to slash its ad rates to reflect the smaller audience.
    The new network has already reportedly been forced to come down considerably from the $7,000 it had initially planned to charge for a 30-second spot, nearly twice what MSG was asking last season.
    Add to that the loss of the $72 million in subscriber fees YES was hoping to squeeze out of Cablevision, and YES quickly ceases to look like the titanic moneymaker YankeeNets had hoped it would be.

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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