Welcome to life on a second-tier cable network:
The owner of The Dish Network said Thursday it pulled the Outdoor Life Network from its system after the cable channel failed to provide NHL games to the nation's second-largest satellite television provider.EchoStar Communications Corp. spokesman Marc Lumpkin said the network did not show games on Oct. 10-11 and on Monday and Tuesday as advertised. "We were not given advance notice that they would not show the programming," he said.
But wait, there's more...
OLN, owned by cable giant Comcast Corp., set a requirement that the channel must be seen by 40 percent of a cable or satellite TV system's viewers in order for it to broadcast the NHL games. It said the Dish Network has failed to meet that requirement."Hockey is a major sport that deserves to be seen as other major sports are on a broadly distributed tier," OLN spokeswoman Amy Phillips said.
It's good to see OLN fighting for a client, but it's a shame to see the NHL's national broadcast partner embroiled in the same sort of dispute we've seen in New York and Washington over local baseball television rights. As other have noted elsewhere, perhaps paying ESPN to carry the league in the States wouldn't have been a bad idea.
Eh. I think this is more about Dish being a really crappy provider for sports (their growth area is international channels) and not about OLN being second-tier. Notice that DirecTV has no problems, probably because the sports freaks are mostly DirecTV subscribers because of the NFL thing.
It took me 3 or 4 years to get ESPN2, while friends a mile on either side got it no problem.
I have The Dish Network – not by choice – and I’ve been disappointed since hockey season began that I don’t get OLN. You’d figure that living in Tennessee – where there’s all sorts of outdoor life going on – would be enough for Dish to bring me this channel. I suppose that getting Center Ice is the only way I’m going to get any not-Preds hockey this year. Thanks a lot, Dish Network.
Dish Network has handled things this way before, both with Viacom (http://money.cnn.com/2004/03/09/technology/echostar_viacom/?cnn=yes) and with Disney (http://www.audiorevolution.com/news/0402/10.disney.shtml).
I recently switched from Dish to Comcast after 10 years as a customer (related to their HD coverage, not because of any problems). These things usually do get worked out in a short time, and as annoying as it’ll be for you Dish owners to miss a couple of National broadcasts, I’m sure they’ll be back soon enough.