Currently with DirecTV, I had Dish, bad customer service. HD is better on DirecTV , bad on cable company here in NY. It sucks right now, I see them on LP on CSN Houston, but I want the whole channel, for updates day by day on Rockets. I go more towards Rockets/Astros/CSN but also DirecTV needs to get better at this negotiation.
Finally called Uverse to b****. I have u200 with HBO and pro Internet for $134 plus tax. They dropped me down to $84 for the same service without HBO for 12 months. Happy with that, now just waiting for is stupid Comcast deal.
$3-4 per subscriber per month, on an @#$ing channel that has advertising, enough so to cover their expenses and likely turn a profit AS IS.. I say hell no, and I'm glad Uverse, Dish etc. are saying that is crazy, their cash grab turns into more and more bad PR daily. Keep posting on FB/Twitter, let them know you loathe their rampant greed!
At that price, no wonder these providers would be willing to add the channel to their sports package and not the basic/extended packages. Meanwhile, CSN can enjoy getting less than a 1.0 rating as long as this continues.
If they're paying $80 million a year for the rights and are getting next to nothing in rights fees then it sounds like they're losing millions every month that goes by without a deal. Smooth move Comcast. They bid this up so high that they can't recoup their costs.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>CSN Houston President / GM talks distribution on @<a href="https://twitter.com/sportsradio610">sportsradio610</a> <a href="http://t.co/ruhDW4yC" title="http://bit.ly/WIOmuB">bit.ly/WIOmuB</a></p>— CSN Houston (@CSNHouston) <a href="https://twitter.com/CSNHouston/status/266756190120325120" data-datetime="2012-11-09T04:16:46+00:00">November 9, 2012</a></blockquote> <script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> http://www.csnhouston.com/basketbal...esident-gm-talks-distribution-sportsradio-610 Innes? ohhh joy..
I would gladly pay $4 a month to watch the rockets and astros. Beats the hell out of $180 Blacked out league pass.
Les and the Astros each on more share than Comcast. Comcast has 3rd most shares. Astros are majority owner. It's beginning to sound to me like it is the Astros who don't care. They won't care to negotiate until the Spring.
They've granted authority to Comcast to make a deal. The ball is in Comcast's court at this point...not with the Rockets or Astros. Neither front office (Rockets or Astros) is involved with negotiating distribution of the channel to different providers.
Do you have a source for this? I could be wrong but I believe the responsibility is on the CSN Houston management and their team, who was hired by the Rockets/Astros ownership (perhaps with some input from Comcast/NBC) to run the station. So Les and Jim Crane do have responsibility in this seeing as how they own the TV network. I realize they aren't handling the negotiations but I have to believe they could make it happen if push came to shove. Edit: Nevermind, David Barron blog in previous post implies that NBC is handling negotations.
Holy crap, I didn't consider that this channel will ultimately be carrying all the Astros Spring Training games!! Wow. That's huge for me.
Now this is just odd. Happened to notice another 'Sprint Zone' update on my EVO. Clicked it just to look, as usual, and there is a listing for NBA Game Time for the smartphone. Real-time updates, scores, highlights, blah blah blah. So I went ahead and downloaded, it was free. Put in Rockets as my favorite team, all that, you know the drill. So then I see a little blurb inside the program: '20% OFF LEAGUE PASS' Hmmm. So I click that, and it just brings up a listing of all the games for today, and I assume if I click one, it would give me the option to buy that one game, I guess.. or maybe it wants to try to sell the whole season package, I don't know, I have not tried it either way. And of course, the Rockets game is not even listed at all. And I figure, it's blacked out, obviously.. what else did I expect? But I clicked on the 'More' option, and it brought up a long list of other information and options. Wayyyy down at the bottom, there is an entry called 'Blackout Information'. Ok, click that, out of sheer morbid curiosity. Here is part of what it says: (excerpt) "We do not support the use of VPN (http:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vpn), internet accelerators (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/web_accelerator), or proxies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/proxy_server). VPN's, internet accelerators or proxies make users look like they are in a different location than they actually are. Note that the Google web accelerator (http://webaccelerator.google.com) is an example of a service which will result in incorrect blackouts." Ok, what the heck? Is Sprint TRYING to make sure we know exactly how to get around blackouts? This is hilarious, at least it MAY be hilarious.. Has anyone tried this on their smartphone? Can you get around the blackouts using something like Google Web Accelerator on the phone, and does it allow you to just pay and watch individual games instead of having to buy the whole season? Just curious really, I was thinking about trying it, but I thought it was worth putting in here to see if anyone else had noticed/tried this. Yes it's on a phone, but the quality of the highlights I saw was a heck of a lot better than the crappy streams.. I officially quit even trying to watch those any more. So, anyone?
games is on NBA TV tonight. anyone here knows how to watch in Houston without getting the black out ****?
