A Political-Economy View of Tennis Channel’s Six-Year Carriage Battle With Comcast

The availability of live sports content on television has reached an all-time high, with the proliferation of dozens of regional sports networks (RSNs). Sports networks charge individual subscriber fees, anywhere from 20 cents to more than $8.00 per month, and frequently negotiate carriage agreements with multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to receive those fees. Since 2010, the independently operated Tennis Channel has fought to gain broad-based carriage from Comcast Cable Corporation, the nation’s largest MVPD. Using a political economy of media framework, the purpose of this paper is to examine court and regulatory filings to understand how an independent RSN positions itself against the established Media Sport complex and the oligopolistic power concentrated with a select few media companies.