The NFL has jumped into the increasingly tangled morass of disputes between content providers and the cable and satellite companies that distribute them, The Post has learned.
The league’s NFL Network, hoping to reach a carriage agreement with Cablevision and bring its Thursday night games to the cable company’s 3 million subscribers, has asked the Long Island-based company’s CEO, James Dolan, to accept the same binding arbitration process Dolan is insisting Fox agree to, sources familiar with the situation said.
Cablevision and Fox are locked in a nearly two-week-long battle over the renewal of carriage rights that has resulted in Fox programming, including NFL games, MLB post-season games, “Glee” and other Fox content being pulled from Cablevision’s system.
Dolan, in a massive marketing push aimed at painting Fox as the unreasonable party, has told subscribers Cablevision is ready to submit to binding arbitration to remedy the impasse but that Fox is unwilling to do so.
“Cablevision has been urging Fox to agree to binding arbitration — the same strategy we’ve been offering Cablevision — but we continue to get sacked,” an NFL source told The Post.
NFL Network chief Steve Borstein, in a letter to Dolan, a copy of which has been obtained by The Post, calls on Cablevision to bring in mediators to resolve the dispute and get key games to viewers.
“I’m encouraged to hear that Cablevision supports binding arbitration and would recommend that approach in our own discussions with you for carriage of NFL Network,” Borstein wrote in the letter. “This is an ideal opportunity for both of our organizations to come to mutually agreeable terms for carriage.”
The NFL Network, in roughly 60 million homes, has deals with major cable and satellite-TV operators except for Time Warner Cable and Cablevision, which won’t deliver the channel to its 3 million New York area households because of the terms the NFL Network is seeking.
Cablevision refused to comment.
The network’s Thursday night games resume on Nov. 11 with the Baltimore Ravens vs. Atlanta Falcons.
Sports is seen as the most important category in keeping viewers paying their cable and satellite subscriptions. There are several other ongoing standoffs related to sports channels. They include DISH vs. MSG Networks, which is owned by Cablevision’s spun-off unit MSG; Comcast and Tennis Channel; DISH and 19 News Corp.-owned Regional Sports Networks or RSNs.
DISH may also be headed for a blackout with Fox; the contract between the two ends on Oct. 31.
Seven million of DISH’s 13 million households carry Fox owned and operated stations.
Separately, both sides said over the weekend they would be complying with calls from the FCC’s media bureau chief, William Lake, to provide details of their dispute and prove they are negotiating in “good faith.”