Current Views On The Sports Broadcasting Act
In November 2006, former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, (D-PA) proposed legislation to repeal the NFL's antitrust exemption under the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.
Specter's concern was based on the National Football League's NFL Network, which is available in a limited number of homes, as compared to the other broadcasters of the NFL. For the 2006-07 NFL season, each NFL team annually earned more than $120 million in shared TV money. The league's officials negotiated various deals with CBS, NBC, Fox, and Disney, and ended up with a six-year (later extended to eight), $24 billion broadcast and cable rights contract. The television deals end in 2013. Additionally, DirecTV paid $700 million every year through 2010 for its Sunday Ticket package. The NFL also decided to keep an eight-game Thursday-to-Saturday night package in-house, placing it on its NFL Network.
Both the Sunday Ticket and NFL Network became issues of concern to Specter, possibly because DirecTV rival Comcast is headquartered in Pennsylvania. Comcast's Versus network attempted to bid for the eight-game package the NFL gave to their own network, but lost.
The NFL Network still has not reached agreements with Time Warner Cable and Cablevision to carry the league-owned network. League officials wanted an excessively high per-subscriber fee for the network in relation to its programming, according to Time Warner executives. Meanwhile, Cablevision chairman Charles Dolan has said nothing publicly about his negotiations with the NFL.
The NFL Network's high per-subscriber fees charged to the cable companies force cable firms to offer the channel as a premium-tier network. This, according to the NFL, is unacceptable, and they demanded their channel be placed on a basic tier, as compared to the higher-priced sports tiers. By doing so, cable companies would have to reduce the number of basic channels or increase the basic cable package rate to comply with the NFL's request. NFL rules however, require that NFL games shown on cable channels (including the NFL Network), be shown on a broadcast television station in the markets of the participating teams (subject to blackouts when necessary).
The other major concern is the lack of availability of NFL Sunday Ticket, restricting it severely through its exclusivity with DirecTV. A similar situation happens with NASCAR HotPass, which moved from the cable companies to DirecTV in 2007, and thwarted by Major League Baseball's MLB Extra Innings, which MLB attempted to push to DirecTV exclusively starting in 2009, but was stopped by threats from legislators.
In what may have been a goodwill gesture to Senator Lautenberg of New Jersey and, in an effort to sway Specter, the NFL gave Time Warner and Cablevision subscribers a free week of programming between December 24 and December 30, 2006. The timing allowed subscribers to tune into the Rutgers–Kansas State Texas Bowl matchup and another college bowl game featuring Minnesota and Texas Tech. Lautenberg had complained that many Rutgers fans in New Jersey were being unfairly denied the opportunity to watch Rutgers in the Texas Bowl because the NFL Network, which has rights to the game, had not yet reached deals with Cablevision and Time Warner Cable.
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