With the 2013 season finished, the best off-season match finds Tennis Channel pitted against Comcast in an ongoing legal dispute. Variety had details yesterday about how Tennis Channel has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the unanimous decision of a three-judge panel in Washington, D.C., which ruled that it hadn't offered “adequate evidence of unlawful discrimination” by Comcast. Previously, the Federal Communications Commission and a lower-level judge had sided with Tennis Channel, which has invoked 1992's Cable Act in building its case.
It seemed unlikely that SCOTUS would ever get involved in our fair sport, and perhaps it remains just so. But so it goes when a cable provider sees a threat to its own programming while an upstart channel proves to have more verve than expected. Says here the Comcast case is shaky. Proper cable carriage would seem to land Tennis Channel squarely alongside the likes of Golf Channel and what was Versus, now NBC Sports Network—both of which Comcast owns. That fact alone makes the matter appear murky at the provider's end of things.
Full disclosure: Your Spin keeper is tired of paying $7.95 extra a month just so he can have Tennis Channel in his cable lineup.
What's your take on this combative situation?
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