MASN-Comcast Carriage Deal Hits Snag
Regional-sports network, cable operator at odds over carriage of Washington Nationals baseball games
By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 8/20/2008 3:05:00 PM
The two-year-old deal between Mid-Atlantic Sports Network and Comcast that settled a long-standing carriage fight hit a snag.
The Federal Communications Commission Wednesday gave MASN until Monday -- a three-business-day extension -- to file its response to Comcast, which was in turn responding to a program-access complaint filed against it by MASN.
An MASN spokesman would not comment on the subject of the complaint, but it appears related to the deal, much praised in Washington, that was struck two years ago between Comcast and MASN for the carriage of Washington Nationals Major League Baseball games.
"MASN signed an agreement almost two years ago to be carried on Comcast systems," Comcast said in an e-mailed statement to B&C, "and now MASN has simply decided that it no longer likes the deal it made. Comcast has fulfilled its part of the bargain and intends to hold MASN to the deal it struck. The complaint filed by MASN is completely without merit."
A source familiar with the complaint said the issue boils down to carriage of the network in two markets -- Roanoke, Va., and Harrisburg, Pa. MASN said Comcast should be carrying the games there, while Comcast said it met the terms of the original agreement, which was carriage in 2.1 million households and did not include carriage of the games in those out-of-market cities.
In August 2006, MASN and Comcast came to terms on carriage after a lengthy fight and under pressure from the FCC, as well as legislators, who wanted access to the games for themselves and their constitutents.
The carriage fight was related to Comcast's contract to carry the Baltimore Orioles and the plan by Orioles owner and MASN part-owner Peter Angelos to put those games on MASN.
Comcast argued that it had the right of first refusal on those Orioles games. Angelos, meanwhile, said MASN was not a third party and he was not putting the Orioles games out for bid after the Comcast contract expired but, instead, keeping them in-house.
Comcast, in turn, chose not to strike a deal to carry MASN games. Angelos had the rights to the nearby Nationals under an unusual arrangement that secured his acquiescence to a move of the Montreal Expos to Washington to become the Nationals -- a move he feared would siphon fans from his Orioles team, only 35 miles or so away.
In approving Comcast's and Time Warner Cable's purchase of bankrupt Adelphia Communications, the FCC conditioned the deal on regional-sports-network program-access protections, saying that the networks and their hometown games were must-have programming and that Comcast's and Time Warner's market power provided opportunity to limit that access. There was even a condition related directly to trying to resolve the MASN complaint.
MASN may have been emboldened to challenge terms of that two-year-old agreement by its recent arbitration victories in a separate challenge to Time Warner carriage of its sports network.
