“IF YOU remember back to the early ’80s, there was a feeling that local pay-per-view was right around the corner. If you remember back to the early ’90s, there was a feeling that local pay-per-view was right around the corner.
So, if the world doesn’t end after Dec. 31, the question in the early 2000s is: When is local pay-per-view coming?
“[It is] not around the corner in this neighborhood,” the executive vice president of Madison Square Garden, Joseph M. Cohen, told The Post this past week.
Cohen, who stands right behind Dave Checketts on the MSG depth chart, said that the Knicks, Yankees, Rangers and all the other local franchises’ games are not going to pay-per-view anytime soon.
However, speaking on behalf of Cablevision, he did discuss a plan that could offer an alternative for some fans.
“Let me give you a futuristic notion,” Cohen said. “Cable is a service business in place to serve the viewers. If some viewer doesn’t want to see every game, then pay-per-view might be a very useful service for that person who doesn’t want to pay for every game, but might be willing to pay for a particular game.”
So on your system, you don’t want to pay for the Madison Square Garden Network or Fox Sports New York, but you want to watch that one Knicks-Pacers game at the end of the regular season. This form of pay-per-view – as a supplement – could work for you.
This plan – which you can’t really make a full judgment on until you see it in its entirety (and see its price) – could do the impossible for the sports fan: change three of the ugliest words in his vocabulary – pay-per-view – into a positive.
The concern for the New York fan is that Cablevision – which owns all the television rights to all the major sports teams in this area (excluding football) and literally owns the Knicks and Rangers – will eventually make consumers pay more for games via pay-per-view.
Cohen, the principal founder of the MSG Network, said that pay-per-view is something Cablevision looks into, but it is not something that is in the current plans.
“We are not sitting here with an egg timer waiting for the pay-per-view ship to come in,” Cohen said.
When pay-per-view makes business sense – which also means public-relations sense – is difficult to answer because there are so many tiers to the Cablevision empire. They own the whole food chain, which gives them a lot of power over us viewers.
“Broad distribution” is one of the key terms in the sports entertainment business. It means that teams and telecasters are trying to reach as many eyes as possible for advertisers. If you, the fan, are willing to buy games, then pay-per-view doesn’t necessarily oppose “broad distribution.”
According to ESPN’s vice president of distribution and development, Bryan Burns, a 25-year veteran of the TV business, pay-per-view on the local level does not make much sense generally.
Burns is the former senior vice president of Major League Baseball. His resume in broadcasting is not a one-pager. So he is a good person to ask about pay-per-view.
“New York in a lot of ways is different than any other market, but, across the country, local pay-per-view will not be where it is at,” Burns said.
Although three NBA teams (Trail Blazers, Rockets and Spurs) have had success with it, pay-per-view makes more sense for one-time events (boxing, wrestling, etc.) and for packages such as ESPN’s GamePlan for college football. For example, GamePlan works because it allows a UCLA fan living in New York to see all of his team’s games.
The Blazers are the longest-running local pay-per-view team, having started BlazerVision when Bill Walton played for them in the late ’70s.
For 25 regular-season games in 1997-98, they charged $7.40 per game, if you bought the season package and $15.95 for individual games. The playoffs were $21.95 per game. They dropped their prices last season, because of the lockout, but a Portland playoff game on BlazerVision still cost $15.95.
According to Cohen, this is not around the corner for us, but the future is hard to predict with digital technology and HDTV and who knows what else coming next millennium.
The ultimate questions lie with you, when it comes down to it: How addicted are you to your games? And how much will you pay for the view? *Phil Mushnick is on vacation. His column returns Aug. 6.
