Collapse
Empire Sports thrived until March 2002 when the Adelphia bankruptcy scandal broke. With Adelphia Communications in freefall and under temporary bank-appointed management, Empire was unable to renew affiliate agreements in the fall of 2002 with Time Warner Cable, its largest non-Adelphia customer and the cable provider for nearly all of upstate New York. The network continued to operate, but was dealt another severe blow in 2003 when Adelphia's board of directors appointed a new chief executive officer, William Schleyer, and chief operating officer, Ron Cooper. Under their watch, Adelphia chose to shut down Empire Sports as opposed to selling it to several interested parties. No longer interested in being in the lucrative regional sports business, Adelphia laid off more than 30 full-time employees and all freelancers in the summer of 2003. The staff cuts forced Empire to eliminate the popular Fan TV but the network itself was still able to survive for another eighteen months.
The NHL lockout that would wipe out the entire 2004–05 NHL season served both as a blessing and a death blow. Financially the lockout actually benefited the network because it was not required to pay the Sabres its annual rights fee of $9.5 million a year. However, the Sabres had acted as a loss leader for Empire, and without them, the network had no core programming. Time Warner decided to drop Empire from its slate of cable packages in late 2004, leaving Empire only available in Western New York and the city of Utica, although it remained on the Direct TV and Dish Network sports tier packages across the country. (The network also streamed on the Internet from the time of the selloff of WNSA—when the station was sold, Empire merely switched the Internet stream from WNSA to Empire's feed—to its closing.) Howard Simon's radio/TV simulcast show was among the last local programs (other than the nightly sports report) that aired on the station.
Adelphia resisted offers from outside interests to purchase Empire. Despite concerns from viewers and local political leaders, Adelphia chose to eliminate Empire altogether on January 19, 2005. All programming was replaced by a continuous tape loop, showing highlights from the network's history, before Empire finally signed off for good on March 7, 2005.
Read more about this topic: Empire Sports Network
Famous quotes containing the word collapse:
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