Tennis Channel Lodges Complaint Against Comcast

LOS ANGELES: Tennis Channel has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) alleging that Comcast Cable Communications is violating program carriage rules by favoring networks it owns and discriminating against unaffiliated services. 

According to the complaint, Comcast isolates Tennis Channel on a premium sports tier received by a small fraction of Comcast subscribers, while it carries Comcast-owned networks that compete with Tennis Channel on basic tiers available to far more subscribers at no additional charge. "We did not want to file this complaint, but Comcast has left us with no choice," said Ken Solomon, the chairman and CEO of Tennis Channel.  "After steadily building the most comprehensive single-sport network in television over the past few years, in the first half of 2009 we had numerous discussions with Comcast.  We made offers with added incentives for it to move us to a competitive, broadly penetrated service tier, as it has done recently with the MLB, NHL and NBA channels, in which it has financial interests.  But Comcast declined to do so."

Tennis Channel’s ratings performance is comparable in its service area to that of Comcast’s sports services, Golf Channel and Versus, according to the complaint. However, while Golf Channel and Versus are among the most broadly distributed channels on Comcast systems, reaching almost all of Comcast’s 23.8 million subscribers, Tennis Channel is limited to the added-cost premium sports tier that reaches only about 2.6 million homes. "This ten-to-one disparity in carriage seriously impedes our ability to grow and compete in the sports cable marketplace," Solomon continued. "It results solely from Comcast’s decision to protect the services it owns from legitimate competition."

The complaint notes that Comcast executives have conceded that they give special carriage consideration to Comcast-owned services and that advertiser-supported services, like Tennis Channel, cannot succeed if they are carried on the Comcast sports tier. The complaint also states that only unaffiliated sports networks are carried on that tier and that all of the services that Comcast owns an interest in enjoy considerably broader coverage.

"This case is truly the litmus test for unaffiliated programmers everywhere, and the future of the public’s interest in having a wide variety of voices and choice in the media marketplace," added Solomon. "Ultimately, we simply want to be treated comparably to the way Comcast treats the sports program services it owns."