SMITH: Missing the Hoosiers, big time

By SCOTT SMITH
Tribune columnist

November 24, 2007 11:27 pm

— Got a call the other day from my 81-year-old buddy, wanting some help figuring out how to watch the Indiana Hoosiers men’s basketball team’s game against Chattanooga.
And I knew telling him he had to switch to a satellite dish wasn’t going to stop him from calling the cable company to quiz customer service at length.
Of course that’s what he did, and boy, was he disappointed.
Just about everyone now knows about the ongoing clash between the Big Ten Network and cable, and your die-hard IU fan knows that unless things change (or they decide to switch from cable to a dish), they’re going to miss at least 17 games broadcast exclusively on the Big Ten Network this season.
That’s the easy part of this. Figuring out who to blame is much more difficult.
The Big Ten Network, which wants to be added to the regular cable lineup, is 49 percent owned by big, bad FOX Sports. Comcast cable is, well, Comcast cable. The cable company is never popular.
Comcast wants people to switch to the more expensive digital cable. BTN/FOX wants to be on regular cable, which has 21/2 times as many subscribers as digital.
In the standoff which continues, the Big Ten Network has refused to let Comcast carry it as an additional charge, and Comcast has refused to kowtow to BTN’s regular cable demands.
At least that’s how it is in the eight states where Big Ten universities are located. If you live in Kentucky, for example, you can get BTN on cable, but only by paying an extra $8 a month.
In Kokomo, by the way, Insight subscribers are already a part of the Comcast system, even though the name won’t change until January.
Comcast says it would cost $1.10 extra, per subscriber, per month, to put BTN on regular cable. It’s an expensive station, they say.
But my guess would be the cable company isn’t particularly interested in just passing their costs along, when they can use Hoosiers and Boilermakers basketball as a carrot and stick to draw people to premium digital services.
The BTN/FOX, on the other hand, wants viewers — not the audience niche programming draws, but the kind of viewership generated by big time college basketball games.
The problem is that college sports fanatics already get five college sports networks in the digital sports package, and frankly, BTN doesn’t have the round-the-clock programming to raise its status above the other college networks.
Given all of the low-interest programming it carries (sorry wrestling, volleyball and track fans) BTN probably belongs as a digital extra.
Then there are fears of what may happen if cable caves in to FOX on this one.
We’re already watching the machinations of the NFL Network with trepidation — another network angling to increase your basic cable bill based on a pittance of annual programming anyone cares about.
As with everything these days, your working Joe is in danger of being priced out of the market.
I’ve called around, and apart from the Big Ten Network, what I’m looking for from cable (including my Internet service), and what I’m looking for from a dish (assuming my Internet service stays with cable broadband), would cost me about the same.
What I can actually afford is another matter.
I can live without digital cable, a DVR, America’s Top 250 on Dish Network, pay-per-view, HBO, Showtime, and on and on and on.
I don’t want to pay $120 a month for the works. I’m already irked about paying $87 a month for basic and extended cable, and broadband Internet.
If I get a dish, I get a DVR and the Big Ten Network, but then my Internet bill goes up. And I lose some of the channels I like on cable unless I upgrade to a bigger channel package. And if I do that, I’ll be paying more than I pay now.
The Big Ten Network might be one of those dealbreakers for some fans, the last push to force a switch to cable. And BTN/FOX is counting on cable giving in, once enough cable subscribers jump ship.
It might work, and it might not. All I know is I got to see IU play before the Big Ten Network flexed its muscles.

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