Direct TV vs Time Warner Cable
Today customers of satellite and cable TV have literally hundreds of games they can pick from every month. Pay per view sports packages like ESPN Gameplan give the subscriber access to nearly 20 college football games every weekend. Even the NCAA Men’s tournament has additional coverage with the Mega March Madness package on Direct TV.
Content is king today, and as the saying goes the networks of course want to deliver as much content as possible to the end user so they can sell more ads. Lots of new all-sports networks have popped up over the last few years. Included among these are Altitude Sports, which carries Nuggets from Denver and the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche games, as well as the Big Ten Network and the mtn, the network of the Mountain West conference.
Sure these channels are good for folks in certain regions of the country, but disputes between the providers of content and cable networks that deliver the content have resulted in difficulties to the customer. Consider what happened last fall, the Big Ten Network started airing in 2007, but they were in a carraige dispute with big cable provider Time Warner. Subscribers of Time Warner in Indiana were unable to see some of the local teams play because of the carraige dispute. While the dispute continued for a whole year, the companies involved came to terms before the 2008 season, so subscribers could stay with Time Warner rather than having to switch to one of the satellite TV companies such as DISH Network or DirecTV. An important thing to do when considering providers is to consider all factors, comparing Time Warner or Direct TV.
Out of market sports packages are another consideration for the customer. Some Dish Network customers have switched providers because the NFL Sunday ticket is exlusively with Direct TV. This has left a bad taste in the mouth of some consumers, who don’t understand why a high demand package like this isn’t available to every provider, especially a big company like Comcast. Other packages though are more fan friendly, like the NHL Center Ice and the NBA League Pass, which are available on almost every cable TV and satellite provider. DIRECTV seems to have all of the sports programming like the Sunday Ticket.
