Can They Get DirecTV at NFL Network Headquarters?
In good football broadcasting news, NFL Network finally signed a peace treaty with Comcast. TMQ wrote two years ago that the core problem was the NFL had ignored econ 101 by attempting to charge more than the market would bear. “As soon as the NFL drops the NFLN asking price to the market-clearing level,” yours truly supposed, the dispute would be resolved. And yea, verily, this came to pass. NFL Network dropped its price from about $8.50 per household per year, too much for a niche network that covers only one sport, to about $5.50. Immediately peace broke out. In bad football broadcasting news, the NFL extended until 2014 DirecTV’s monopoly over NFL Sunday Ticket. As TMQ annually notes, millions of American homes and apartments for technical reasons cannot receive the DirecTV satellite signal — my house can’t — so the monopoly effectively bans millions of Americans from purchasing Sunday Ticket and deciding for themselves which NFL contests to watch. Sunday Ticket is offered on cab
