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Cablevision to carry NFL Network, RedZone channel after all

Cablevision’s James Dolan is caving and adding the pricey NFL Network, which is going to drive up the cost of your cable bill.

Cablevision’s James Dolan is caving and adding the pricey NFL Network, which is going to drive up the cost of your cable bill. (
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The sports TV guys are winning — big time.

After years of playing hardball with the National Football League, Cablevision finally caved and agreed to carry the NFL Network and RedZone channel.

The Bethpage, LI-based cable operator, with more than 3 million customers mostly in the New York area, will make the channels available to subscribers of its $75-a-month IO Preferred program package and higher tiers.

Under pressure from both competitive marketing and a vocal subset of sports fans, Cablevision will add two more sports channels to the 15 already available on the same tier.

Although no financial terms were disclosed, the NFL Network alone is expected to tack on about a buck to customers’ monthly bills.

With the deal, the NFL Network now reaches more than 60 million homes.

It has taken the league nine years to hit critical mass, but industry watchers predict it won’t be long before the lone big holdout, Time Warner Cable, also throws in the towel.

“We remain hopeful that we can reach a resolution,” said a Time Warner Cable spokeswoman. “But we have been close before only to have it fall apart so we need to be cautious about predicting success.”

Sports programming is not only must-see TV, but must-pay TV.

Sports channels get around 20 percent of the audience, but 50 percent of the fees. For Disney’s ESPN and ESPN2, the figure is close to 20 percent of the fees and 2.5 percent of the audience, according to analysts.

SNL Kagan estimates that the top five most expensive sports networks cost distributors around $10 a month per subscriber, while the top five entertainment channels cost just $3.

And sports programming inflation is pushing up cable bills faster than any other genre. Pay-TV costs have risen 7 percent this year even as customers continue to drop cable video packages in droves. DirecTV lost 52,000 customers, its first quarterly subscriber loss ever, while Time Warner lost 169,000 in the second quarter.

“The biggest threat to the existing media ecosystem is affordability, and it is sports, above all else, that is driving the affordability crisis,” Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett noted in April.

Ironically, Time Warner Cable is set to become one of the biggest bullies on the block.

The firm is in heated discussions with DirecTV, Dish, Cox and AT&T for carriage of its two regional sports channels — Time Warner Cable SportsNet and Time Warner Cable Deportes, which will air LA Lakers and LA Galaxy games — for a price tag of $4 per subscriber. The channels launch in October.

Some say DirecTV will find it all but impossible not to carry the Time Warner Cable service given that the Lakers play in DirecTV’s biggest market.

“We, as an industry, need to work together to figure out a solution that works for the content rights holders and distributors, but most importantly, one that works for the customer,” Derek Chang, executive vice president of content at DirecTV, told The Post.