NCAA TV

[CU at Stanford]

I gather that for those of us living in CA, we are out of luck....:`( :-(

[jtwcornell91]

john smith wrote:
if i were people i would be calling tomorrow and making sure what they have for blackout plans...

I tried that today, but DirecTV doesn't seem to know in advance what's going to be blacked out, so all they could do was make educated guesses based on the general policies.  I've got a backup place to watch the games on cable (and Saturday night's game is also on the local cable, so I assume it will be an indicator of whether Sunday's will be blacked out or not).  I thought I getting the dish I was removing my dependence on sports bars, but apparently not. :-(

If this goes down like I expect, I'm going to write to the NCAA and ask that they not sell the rights to future tournaments to Cox Sports Channel New Orleans.  Hopefully if no one writes to thank them for doing it, they will register negative interest.  The whole thing is really annoying, since the most loyal college hockey fans will presumably have found a way to get DirecTV by now (since even digital cable doesn't offer the smorgasboard of out-of-market RSNs that allow us to watch many college hockey games throughout the year), so the deal with Cox and the related blackout just serves to inconvenience the people who actually care about the sport.

[upperdeck]

thats about all you can do.. but the whole industry is screwed up... the blackouts serve noone yet they continue to do it.. if my local RSN buys the rights then fine blackout the others on directv. but if noone buys the rights locally what good does blacking me out do? its not llike i am costing someone money. the worst part is there is noone to complain to other than congress and they dont care...  try this.. I live where OTA feeds dont exist.. i talk with all the networks and get waivers. Directv gives me the net-work feeds. then they show a game like SU on cbs and Directv blacks me out cause i have to watch it over the local OTA feed which i cant get in the first place... same for NCAA football i cant get ABC so i buy the college pass to watch a game and again they black out the gameplan so i can watch it on local ABC which i cant get...
they make up the rules as they go along and noone cares.

[paulspen]

If you have the DirecTV SportsPak you should be able to get the games on Empire or Fox North. They won't blackout to zipcodes in CA because none have local fascist cable networks that will carry the game.

Looks like we're all going to Tom's

[paulspen]

Care to share the number of that direct line to DTV to complain about blackout? The regular service reps have no clue. ::rolleyes::

[jtwcornell91]

PaulsPen wrote:
Care to share the number of that direct line to DTV to complain about blackout? The regular service reps have no clue. ::rolleyes::

I just called 1-800-DIRECTV.  But I don't think complaining to DTV will help much.  They obviously didn't make the blackout rules that give local cable hegemonies precedence over them.  Presumably the responsibility for that goes to some combination of the cable companies, the FCC, and the NCAA.  Probably the only thing DTV can be blamed for is not having better lobbyists.

[Neil Shapiro \'83]

Does anyone know the satellite coordinates of the feed from providence?

[jtwcornell91]

Should be joined in progress on FSNorth at the top of the hour.