Cable stuffing the NFL this Thanksgiving

[RLJSlick]

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Thanksgiving, a day given to excess, will include a third helping of pro football this year -- but only for a fraction of U.S. homes.

When the NFL Network, owned by the National Football League,shows its first live regular season game Thursday evening with the Denver Broncos facing off against the Kansas City Chiefs, only about 13 million of 70 million cable households will be able to see the game.
Such a diet seems downright un-American for the holiday second only to Super Bowl Sunday in its attention to the National Football League.

The limited distribution of the game was even examined at a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Fortunately for the future of democracy, CBS and Fox will each air a game earlier in the day, as will local broadcast affiliates in Denver and Kansas City.

The two leading satellite television firms have reached a deal to carry the NFL Network. But several of the largest cable operators, including No. 2 Time Warner Cable, No. 4 Charter Communications (Charts) and Cablevision (Charts), have not signed deals to carry the network. Time Warner Cable and CNNMoney.com are both units of Time Warner (Charts).

And some of the large cable operators that are offering the network, including No. 1 Comcast (Charts) and No. 3 Cox, are making it available only to customers who have more expensive digital cable services and who also have subscribed to a special package of channels for which they have to pay an additional fee.

The NFL Network signed those deals with Comcast and Cox before the league decided to put a package of eight Thursday night and Saturday night games on its network this season.

At that point, when its live offerings were limited to pre-season and NFL Europe games, it was tough to push for prime placement for the network, or get the top-dollar per-subscriber fees from cable operators it is now seeking.

Now the league believes it deserves to be offered to as broad a range of a cable systems' customers as possible. The league is said to be asking for a fee of 70 cents a month per subscriber, a rate that is seen by cable companies as too pricey. In fact it's more than just about any non-sports cable network gets paid

[Matt Heebner]

Channel 95 for all you Directv'ers out there for all NFL Network games ....

Matt