That's Comcastic!

I think the greed is by the NFL owners, who created the "NFL Network" which only has about 6 to 8 games all season. They still apparently expected to sell it to cable systems because, heaven knows, the NFL isn't making enough money as it is.

So the game, which should have been played on a Sunday (or Saturday) afternoon, was played at night. Instead of having millions watching it, they played to an overall audience of what, 100,000? Now that's executive genius.

Yes, in this scenario, the cable companies can't get to terms with the NFL Network, so they get tons of subscriber complaints. This reached a new fever pitch with the Packers/Cowboys Thursday night game a few weeks ago when they were both 10-1. Charter and Time Warner cable customers couldn't even get the game, and other folks have to pay for a bigger cable package to get the game. Yay, the NFL Network!

And I got the game on DirecTV. Neat, I get Steelers/Rams but thanks to Comcast I miss almost every Blazer game.

My takeaway: Network specific sports channels suck.

The NFL is a behavioral clone of many other entitities in the entertainment industrial complex. But their challenge is peculiar to sport properties: unlike music videos, movies, video games or daytime talk shows, the content actually predates the delivery service. The NFL's eternal project then is to make football—the game itself, which ostensibly belongs to anybody who plays it—its own, something understood as being inextricably linked to the National Football League (MTV does not have this challenge. They can grow beyond music videos because music videos were always theirs; by the time some random kid with quick hands makes a better Daft Punk video and posts it to Youtube they've already moved on to game shows, multimedia, movies and experiential marketing). And baseball and basketball have had a slightly easier time of it as they are not so institutionally rooted to the education system and can therfore make broader cultural claims to merit and authenticity. But football? That's a tough sell. Maybe it's a risky idea to claim exclusivity by restricting consumer access, but if the long term goal is to teach people that they have nowhere else to go then it's definitely their smartest move.

Now that's executive genius.

Be thankful you were spared the inane ramblings of Messrs. Deion Sanders and Marshall Faulk, who, I guess, were filling in for the very able Collinsworth. What an absolutely awful production.

It's just business like anything else...sad, but true.

The NFL is a behavioral clone of many other entitities in the entertainment industrial complex.

One difference: The other entities (usually) pay taxes.