Blazers.com says "November/December." Everyone else said by the end of the year. We're in January now and I haven't heard anything new. Have you?
Comcast is just loosing money not doing a stream. I would pay for a good Blazer game stream every game but since there is none I just find free streams online. NBA League Pass should just not block games if comcast won't do it!
As has been said before... what financial or business incentive does Comcast have to deal with the Blazers, or it's competitors (DirecTV, Dish, etc.)? It has a MONOPOLY on a product that a lot of people want, and can charge top dollar for it. Don't live in an area that Comcast services? You have two choices: hope your local cable company ponies up the ransom I MEAN fair market price for CNSW, or move. Comcast could give two shits about you unless you are paying them money. Obviously they have an iron-clad contract with the Blazers that limits, if not completely precludes the Blazers from doing anything about it. And whose fault is that, boys and girls? Why yes, it's the Blazers. Comcast, for as much as I hate their guts for being exactly the cutthroat corporate goons that give the free market a bad name, is simply taking full advantage of rights that were GIVEN to it by the Blazers. If the Blazers had any recourse on the terms of it's deal with Comcast, don't you think the P.R. disaster that the entire situation has become would spur it into action? Or maybe the Blazers realize that the number of people pissed off enough to rant on local sports talk radio, or blog about it, or post angry rants on Blazer message boards like this are a VERY small fraction of the fan base, most of whom just shrug their shoulders that they can't see the games on TV, or go to a sports bar. In other words, I've given up. Congratulations, Blazers and Comcast. You've won. I don't care if I see the Blazers play as often as I'd like. Yes, I'm still a huge fan, but most of the "Rise" will have to be invisible to me except for SportsCenter highlights and the occassional game on KGW or national. I'm waiting for the day when you contract the radio play-by-play to some satellite radio pay model.
Larry Miller's job is to try to sugar coat a bad situation. He's tried to give us false promises about Comcast making a deal with the satellite folks, but nobody bought that. So now he gives us false promises about internet streaming. Maybe soon he'll start making false promises about providing some sort of closed circuit television setup at local highschools in areas where Comcast isn't available but league pass blacks out Blazer games.
No, it has a MONOPOLY on a product that a lot of people want, but next to nobody is willing to pay much at all for it. They over-valued their product from the start, and acceptance of the basic concept of paying to view sports is on a rapid decline. Eventually, advertisers will pay the full cost of all broadcasts from sports leagues, like it used to be.
He has actually. From the start he's said that this idea of streaming was a bandaid to the much larger problem of only Comcast subscribers being able to watch Blazer games. He's said a few times that he's spoken with people at Blazer headquarters and NOBODY thinks Larry Miller is going to make this streaming thing work. I think he's bored with the whole thing now. Everyone's just taking it as a fact that you can only watch the Blazers on Comcast and that's that.
I don't know.. if anything, Canzano has been the only one in the media who's consistently been on Comcast for the whole debacle.
There seems to be a shift where station revenue is changing from advertising based to fee based. I don't know if it is because more and more people (like me) are recording and fast forwarding through commercials or what... but I think the landscape 5 years from now will be vastly different. I don't hardly watch any live TV anymore... and music is not over the air... but streamed or on a media player. I watch Netflix movies over the Internet. I wouldn't be suprised to see TV 100% on demand in the future... with live things the exception instead of the rule. As they switch to streams and on demand though... people have the ability to skip the commercials... and that is the problem I think. If everything is on-demand the need for DVRs disappears and providers can accurately guage eyeballs on the commercials... possibly even elimintating fast forwarding. It will be interesting to see how it shakes out. If there are not already I'd expect to see a bunch of Internet TV offerings in the near future. If I can stream HD to my TV (and I can and do with Netflix already) what is to keep them from offering all regular TV the same way? Then no one needs Comcast *cable*... unless they are your Internet provider. The $$ will be in the content... not the service like Comcast cable TV or DirecTV or Dish etc...
Canzano did say something about this yesterday on his show. I didn't hear the whole thing, but he said he asked Larry Miller about the situation and Miller said he couldn't comment because of legality issues or something like that. So Canzano said he believes that the Blazers, who had given Comcast a Dec 31st deadline to get something done, are going to pursue legal action. Don't get your hopes up, but maybe this Comcast fiasco will finally be dealt with.
I am shocked and surprised http://www.columbian.com/weblogs/bl...between-blazers-comcast-sportsnet-northwest-/
