How much would BTN cost consumers?
At the price BTN is demanding within the 8 Big Ten states, this channel would be MORE EXPENSIVE than 95% of the channels on Family Cable. That equates to a premium price, and would dramatically increase basic cable rates. BTNs position is that we add the channel in a place where these extremely high programming costs would be assessed to substantially all of our customers not only during the sports seasons, but 12 months a year. In the Big Ten states, there are approximately 18 million cable subscribers so we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars going from consumers pockets to BTN every year.