Today customers of satellite and cable TV have literally hundreds of games they can pick from every month. While 25 years ago you would see a couple of college football games on Saturday and a few on Sunday, today you can literally pick from two dozen or more games every weekend.  Even the NCAA Men’s tournament has expanded coverage with the Mega March Madness package on Direct TV.

The motto today is “Content is King” and as the saying goes the networks of course want to deliver as much content as possible to the sports fan so they can make more money on advertising. Quite a few brand new all-sports channels have popped up in the past couple of years. A few of the new networks are Altitude Sports, which carries NBA Nuggets and the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche matches, and also the Big 10 network and the Mtn, the broadcast home of the Mountain West conference.

Sure these channels are good for people in certain regions of the country, but disagreements between the providers of content and those who deliver the content have resulted in difficulties to the customer. For example, the Big Ten Network started airing in 2007, but the network was unable to strike a deal with cable TV provider Time Warner. Subscribers of Time Warner in Illinois were not able to watch some of the home town teams play due to this dispute. Finally however, the parties came to terms before the fall football season, so customers could remain with with Time Warner instead of having to switch to one of the satellite television companies such as DISH Network or Direct TV.  An important thing to do when considering providers is to consider all factors, comparing DIRECTV against Time Warner.

Specialized sports programming packages are another option hard core sports fans should consider. The Direct TV Sunday Ticket package is exclusive to the satellite TV provider so if you want this football fest, you have to switch. This has left a bad taste in the mouth of some consumers, who don’t understand why a high demand package like this isn’t available to every provider, especially a big company like Time Warner. Other sports packages though are more friendly to subscribers, like the NHL Center Ice and the NBA League Pass, which are available on almost every cable TV and satellite company. Direct TV seems to have all of the sports programming.

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