Fox, which is broadcasting the football game, has been unavailable to Cablevision subscribers since early Saturday morning. Cablevision and Fox’s parent company, News Corporation, have been arguing over the price that should be paid for Fox stations, a price that is usually passed along to subscribers.
At 1 p.m., Cablevision subscribers who tuned into WNYW, the Fox station in New York City, saw a message about the blackout in place of the New York-Detroit game.
Foreshadowing the current stalemate, Fox warned days ago in newspaper advertisements that the Giants game could be affected by the contract dispute. Fox appears to be using the football game as leverage.
Cablevision and the News Corporation returned to the bargaining table Sunday around 12:30 p.m., but there was no immediate indication that progress was being made. On Saturday night, Fox said the companies remained “far apart” on terms for a new contract, which could raise the price that subscribers pay for the Fox network.
The dispute affects about three million subscribers of Cablevision in the New York metropolitan area. The two companies have had months to negotiate, but they haven’t been able to agree on a price for the retransmission right. The blackout started just after midnight on Saturday morning.
Blackouts that last longer than a day are highly unusual in the television business. Cablevision’s fight last March with The Walt Disney Company over fees for the ABC network culminated in a 20-hour outage that ended during the Academy Awards. Ten years ago, a dispute between Disney and another distributor, Time Warner Cable, resulted in a 39-hour outage.
At the time of the face-off over the Academy Awards, many analysts said it was only an early skirmish in what was likely to be a long and bitter war over retransmission fees, and that future battles were likely to involve the most popular programming the networks have to offer, specifically big sporting events.
There is arguably no sport that elicits more passion than football. Politicians rushed over the weekend to line up with the fans and against the fighting companies.
José R. Peralta, a Democratic state senator, said in a statement Sunday, “On behalf of the millions of hard-working men and women and their families who simply want to relax and enjoy a ballgame, or have a few laughs watching television during their free time — a luxury they’ve paid for — I urge that programming be restored immediately while negotiations continue.”
Fox has refused to restore the programming, saying that it would unfairly reward Cablevision.
Football fans did not have to be shut out entirely. They could access Fox over the public airwaves, and on the Internet if they did a little digging. A Web site called iviTV, which transmits the signal of WNYW in New York (as well as a host of other channels in New York, Seattle and some in Italy and China) for a monthly charge of $4.99 a month, was offering a 30-day free trial on Sunday that made the game available live via the Internet.
The site, which is based in Seattle, calls itself a “legal service,” and a co-founder, Hal Bringman, says the service pays broadcasters for rights the same way that cable systems do. But the National Association of Broadcasters objects to the Web site, and said in a statement last month that “it is blatantly illegal to steal broadcasters’ copyrighted works and signals.”
When the blackout started on Saturday, the American Television Alliance, a group funded by distributors like Cablevision, said in a statement that “over three million households in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Philadelphia are now left without access to baseball playoffs, NFL games, and local news and weather.” The group asked, “How much longer will consumers have to live in fear of blackouts by broadcasters? What community is next? The FCC and Congress must immediately step in to reform retransmission consent laws.”
Presently there is little that the government can do. Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement Saturday afternoon that he would introduce legislation to create “new rules of the road” for retransmission consent.
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