YES NETWORK
AS things currently stand, three million area Cablevision subscribers still don’t know if they’ll be able to watch 130 Yankee cable telecasts this season. In a related development, Cablevision CEO Jim Dolan said that he plans to survey subscribers to gauge how much extra they’d be willing to pay for YES, the Yankees’ new cable network.
And that should make for preposterous fun.
Previous Cablevision surveys have been perversely hilarious in that questions are worded to produce the answers that Cablevision wants.
One Cablevision survey taken years ago, before Cablevision owned MSG Network, asked subscribers how much more per month they’d be willing to pay for MSG. The answers began with $1, then escalated.
From the responses to that question, Cablevision concluded – and announced – that its very own subscribers felt that MSG should appear as a premium or additional-pay channel. Of course, there were no boxes for respondents to check other than those that would have them pay extra for MSG.
Oh, and that was the year, 1989, that Cablevision kept MSG – with Knick, Ranger and newly purchased Yankee games – off its systems.
For those of you scoring at home, it comes down to George Steinbrenner vs. the Dolans. How’s that for a rooting interest? Pick your poison.
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Cable operators remain so negligent that they’ll even do dirt to their masters. On Tuesday, Time-Warner’s Manhattan system blacked out the Knicks-Magic telecast on TBS, a Time-Warner network. A billboard that appeared in Manhattan on TBS claimed that the blackout was per FCC regulations. Baloney!
As a Knick road game, it should have appeared on both MSG and TBS. TW customer service reps reflexively blamed MSG. More baloney. MSG could not prevent TW from pulling TW programming off a satellite.