Disclaimer - I do not want football programming on basic cable.
Football on TV is huge. But DirecTV is evil. DirecTV is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Not only does DirecTV call customers on the Do-Not-Call list to ask if they want to hear a sales pitch anyway, but they also carry the Big Ten Network.
The Big Ten Network was launched by the Big Ten Conference in conjunction with Fox Sports which is owned by News Corporation. The Big Ten Conference wants to be on basic cable, at a cost of $1.10 per subscriber. Most cable companies want to place the channel on a sports tier so that only sports fans who want the channel pay for the channel. For comparison, a cable company can carry MTV, the Comedy Channel, and the History Channel for the same price to customers as The Big Ten Network.
This is the complete opposite of how the Fox News channel was launched in 1996. At that time News Corp offered cable operators $10 per subscriber to carry the channel. And 10 year carriage agreements were signed at only $0.13 per subscriber. Fox executives figured that when those 10 years were up they would have a successful channel and therefore demand higher rates from carriers whose customers were now accustomed to having Fox News on basic cable. This "crack cocaine" strategy worked.
Because of the outrageous fees the Big Ten Network is demanding I am led to believe that News Corporation never intended the channel to be carried by cable companies. But if a few companies gave in that is even better because of the extra and unexpected revenue and this would make the cable companies holding off on the channel appear non-responsive. No, the Big Ten Network was launched as a vehicle to drive customers to DirecTV in order to inflate subscriber counts prior to News Corporation selling their stake in DirecTV to Liberty Media.
NFL Network has insane pricing too. The price to a cable company to carry the NFL Network's eight football games is the same as College Sports TV + ESPN2 + ESPNU (and the NFL Network is asking some providers for a 250% raise.) While the NFL is popular (22.5% of the people watching TV saw the end of the Patriots vs Colts game last weekend), why should 75% of people be saddled with fees that subsidize the TV habits of 1/4 of the audience? Today the NFL Network came out to ask cable customers to switch to another provider if theirs doesn't carry the channel for free. This is probably just another ploy to drive subscribers to DirecTV, which has been a long time 17 billion dollar per year whore for the NFL. For example they get 2 million suckers to pay $269 for the NFL "Sunday Ticket" each year. The NFL has a long time love for all things Rupert Murdoch. It all started back in 1993 when he grossly overpaid for rights to the NFC football games. This left 12 big-market CBS stations with a huge hole in their Sunday programming - so they jumped ship to Fox. And so began the meteoric rise of the NFL's popularity and the rise of the Fox channel. Murdoch and Fox have been pimping for the NFL ever since and it appears now that the NFL is returning the favor.
The NHL is being much more reasonable. For example, Charter Communications is launching the NHL Network this month - but in the Digital Sports Tier. Not basic cable.
What is amazing is that people (including football fans) complain about rising cable rates - but these are tied directly to increased programming costs (who do you think really pays athletes multimillion dollar per year salaries) and when some cable companies attempt to keep costs down these people complain. And it wouldn't surprise me if the same people clamoring for these football networks also want a'la carte television (paying only for the channels they watch). So the cable companies try to offer an a'la carte tier and get hammered for it. It is disingenuous at best.
Bibliography:
2004 Annual Report - Cable TV Economics
Wikipedia-Big Ten Network
Putting Fans First (funded by Comcast)
NFL Network
Murdoch's Biggest Score
