Comcast SportsNet Houston's first reporter/anchor hire

Splash!!!!

 

Purty mouth.

 

Fun fact! She was born with those earrings on and has never once taken them off. Not even during her time as an alligator wrestler in the early 80s.

 

Point elbows.

 

I thought she looked like Lisa Kudrow with bangs. Here's a fun fact: there are no pictures of Lisa Kudrow with bangs.

I, for one, have a big earring fetish.

 

she can handle my ball games

 

I've met all the new reporters at CSN Houston (I work with them) and I think you are going to like them. I worked with Kelli the other day and she is very good at what she does. You can follow them all on Twitter. Our web site goes live sometime today and of course our Comcast channel launches in the afternoon. Bill Worrell and Calvin will be on the launch show with many others.

Here are the Twitter names to our anchors/reporters:

@kjohnsoncsn Kelli Johnson
@bdolemancsn Bill Doleman
@tblackmoncsn Tiffany Blackmon
@mpaytoncsn Marius Payton
@ho_chencsn Howard Chen
@jpalmercsn James Palmer
@leilarahimicsn Leila Rahimi
@sebisalazarcsn Sebastian Salazar
@saraeckertcsn Sara Eckert

 

anyone hot?

 

So she can find your faults?

 

Yes.

I have a 14 inch monitor, so I cant see anything above the pointy chin.

 

http://sportsvideo.org/main/blog/20...find-new-home-with-comcast-sportsnet-houston/

Fans of local teams stand to win as new network touts homegrown coverage

By David Barron | Sunday, September 30, 2012 | Updated: Monday, October 1, 2012 6:47am

Comcast SportsNet Houston signs on at 5 p.m. Monday as a tried-and-true formula for a new generation of Houston sports fans.

It's as 21st century as the network's gleaming studios in the Houston Pavilions and as 20th century as its programming mantra: a digital-era reset of Home Sports Entertainment, Houston's original regional sports network.

"The plan is the same: more local programming about teams that fans care about," said Bill Worrell, an original HSE employee in 1983 who will be part of CSN Houston as the Rockets' play-by-play announcer. "It gets us back to the original idea of HSE. It was popular then, and it will be popular again."

A joint venture of the Astros, Rockets and NBC Sports Group, CSN Houston will air Rockets games this fall and Astros games in 2013. It also will feature a weekday talk show and three daily sportscasts, the first combination of that kind in Houston since the HSE days, with high school and college games and, beginning Oct. 10, a Texans postgame show.

"This will be an inherently Houston sports network: a destination for local fans," said Jon Litner, group president of the NBC Sports Group. "We will have a studio operation in the heart of Houston, and we will have live shows that will be a beacon for the passion that sports fans have for their teams.

"It won't come from Dallas or Denver or some other hub. It will be in the heart of their city and their region."

CSN Houston will feature a few familiar faces, including Fox Sports Houston veteran Kevin Eschenfelder, the Rockets broadcast crew of Worrell, Matt Bullard and Clyde Drexler plus the return of Calvin Murphy, and former KTBU (Channel 55) anchor Matt Doleman.

Live from downtown

But many of the lead faces come from other CSN affiliates, includ- ing Kelli Johnson from CSN Mid-Atlantic and Marius Payton from the defunct Mountain West network.

The equipment and surroundings, particularly the 3,000-square-foot studio with three sets for news and talk shows, are light-years ahead of the old HSE building on Gulfton in southwest Houston and even the smaller downtown studio of Fox Sports Houston, which will be absorbed into Irving-based Fox Sports Southwest.

But CSN Houston also faces challenges that could impact viewers.

As Texas fans have learned since last year's ESPN/Longhorn Network launch, cable and satellite carriage is not automatic.

CSN Houston will launch on Comcast in Houston, Louisiana and Arkansas and on Phonoscope, Coastal Link and En-Touch in the Houston area, but it will not be available from other cable providers or, barring last-minute agreements, on DirecTV, Dish Network, AT&T U-verse or Verizon FiOS.

Still expanding

Team and network officials are uniformly optimistic, but it is by no means a sure thing that CSN Houston will reach full distribution in the Houston area before the Rockets open the regular season Oct. 31 in Detroit, let alone the preseason opener Oct. 10.

"We believe our service will have a strong value proposition to distributors and viewers," Litner said. "We are in active negotiations with all the interested distributors, and we are very confident we will reach the right answer."

As for the rest of the five-state region it services, NBC faces a virtual Maginot Line of cities along Interstate 35 - Dallas, Waco, Austin, San Antonio and Brownsville - serviced by Time Warner, which has taken a traditional hard line against rising RSN fees, and where interest in recent years, particularly in Central and South Texas, has swung toward the Rangers, whose games air on Fox Sports Southwest.

Nonetheless, Michael Cramer, director of the Texas Sports and Media program at the University of Texas and former president of the Rangers and Dallas Stars, believes Time Warner eventually will carry CSN Houston.

"There is such great content, I would find it hard to believe Time Warner eventually will not sign up," he said. "Will there be some grumbling? Yes. I think they just have to pay up."

Another potentially tricky question involves news coverage. It remains to be seen whether the Rockets and Astros, as majority stockholders, will countenance unvarnished coverage if circumstances warrant and whether the network will be more observer than cheerleader.

Unbiased reporting

"We would never ask anyone to change their reporting," said Rockets president Tad Brown. "(Rockets owner Leslie Alexander) has always made it clear that he wants the truth to be told and the stories to be told properly. We trust that our partners are going to do the right thing and that they will report the facts accordingly.

"We don't plan to be Big Brother, monitoring everything, but we have an interest in seeing that our team does well and is promoted well."

Astros president George Postolos, who first envisioned the Rockets-Astros partnership when he worked for the Rockets in the late 1990s, said network executives "can figure it out."

"We've seen it done with other regionals, and that is what we want to happen here," he said. "We feel we are deepening the relationship with fans, and if we do, we know we are headed in the right direction. If we are straying from that, we need to adjust."

Longtime CSN executive and consultant Tom Stathakes and news director Doug Brown, a veteran of two CSN regionals, pledge to cover, in Brown's words, "stories as they need to be covered."

"In news and talk you have to be legitimate, and if you're not, nobody is going to want to watch you," Stathakes said. "The ownership groups talk to each other, and they know the only way we are going to have credibility and the only way people will watch is if we are legitimate in our coverage."

With the clock ticking toward the launch, optimism was high last week as staff members ran through rehearsals.

"People are going to be amazed," Eschenfelder said. "It will be about Houston. It won't be shared and mixed in with other places, and you know what I'm talking about. This is about things that are important to people who watch sports in Houston."

Houston proud

And while Stathakes might be drifting into fantasy in his example, he nonetheless reflects the enthusiasm of CSN Houston staffers.

"If a Houston pitcher pitches a no-hitter, we'll do a 2½-hour postgame show," he said. "We're going to cover news and information and teams like nobody has covered them before. I'm confident about that."

 

I for one will not be watching Comcast this year due to my Rockets and Astros continuing of sucking ass.

 

So you're only going to watch when they "get better."

There's a name for this... but I can't put my finger on it...

 

Man, that sounds awesome. Can't wait.

 

Where did you go to school? Your sentence structure and grammar is awful.

 

This sucks i have dish and will miss the games if they don't reach an agreement soon. Where does everyone go if you want to stream the games?

 

man, I bet it sucked leaving KPRC with all them hot chicks.

 

Yates

 

What I remember of HSE is that nobody had it. As a result, most everyone I knew never saw an Astros or Rockets home game for many many years. Now that the road games wont be on regular TV then a lot of us won't be seeing many Rockets games at all unless these providers pick it up as a regular channel and not some $10 add on package.