Thursday night brings the debut of live televised regular season games on the NFL Network, which means for the millions of Bright House cable subscribers, they're once again fresh out of luck in seeing such action.
The cable channel began broadcasting regular season games in 2006, but have never fully "penetrated" the cable market for one simple reason -it's fees and rates for cable systems are extremely high – currently the fifth-highest on television.
Time Warner for years has been the biggest cable system to announce that would not purchase the rights to the network because of those high fees, and Bright House has always been right behind them (There was talk earlier this year that TW would get the network for its 14 million subscribers, but that hasn't happened yet).
Joe Durkin is a spokesman for Bright House in the Tampa Bay area. He says if you're a Bright House subscriber who hoped that the impasse between the network and the cable system had ended in going into the network's slate of regularly season televised schedule, think again.
This article appears in Nov 10-16, 2011.