Dolgin.
In a wide ranging, no-holds-barred exclusive live interview with WNHH radio’s “Cannoli and Knish Sports Radio Hour,” the CEO and president of the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network (YES), Tracy Dolgin, gave almost a million Yankee fans throughout Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania the bad news they didn’t want to hear: Despite MLB’s Opening Day having come and gone, Comcast is still refusing to put the YES Network back on the air. And, remarkably, there is no resolution in sight or even negotiation taking place.
This is depriving potentially 300,000 Connecticut Comcast customers in 83 towns across the state, and 900,000 Comcast customers throughout the region, from watching Yankees games, in their homes, on their basic cable systems.
Dolgin told the WNHH hosts that YES offered the lowest price in the marketplace and Comcast accepted that price for the entirety of the 2015 baseball season before shutting off YES last November.
“We used to like baseball and sports better when we would do a countdown to spring training, not counting the days we were off the air, so it’s not fun,” Dolgin said. “But we really aren’t any closer to a resolution than we were on the day we started. But I think that was Comcast’s plan all along … when they took us off the air after we’d been on the entire season operating under a new agreement that set a price the rest of the market was paying, when they turned us off they knew they had the lowest price, they knew they’d been paying it, and they knew it was impossible that we’d lower our rate. They turned us off to have us off — not to exert any pressure on us. So I doubt we see a resolution any time soon.”
Central to Dolgin’s argument that Comcast is at fault in this painful situation for Yankee fans is his claim that the YES Network offered Comcast the same price that all of the other, larger regional cable providers (such as Cablevision, Time Warner and Verizon) had already agreed to pay back in February of 2015 — and that Comcast actually accepted the new rate, carried YES at that rate throughout the entirety of the 2015 season, and then abruptly “turned off the switch” on YES in November of 2015 after the season had ended.
According to Dolgin, the reason for the abrupt shutoff was that YES wouldn’t agree to contractual language that would give Comcast an advantage over its competitors.
In February 2015, Dolgin noted, “We offered to give Comcast the lowest price in the market, even though they are not the biggest distributor. In fact, they’re the fourth biggest distributor in the market — Cablevision is triple their size for example. So we’d already negotiated with the bigger distributors previously, we’d agreed on a new lowest market rate, and right off the bat we offered Comcast that rate. And right off the bat they accepted that rate. … They wanted language that basically gave them an uneven playing field, which is what they wanted because they’re the biggest distributor in the country, just not in the region, against current competition and new competition. They wanted favorable language that we wouldn’t even give the bigger guys, because if the world changes we want to be able to adapt, like with our new Sling deal … and so they agreed to pay that lowest rate in the marketplace, [and] they paid it the entire season. We were literally extending the contract a couple of weeks at a time, a month at a time. And they were promising, out of one side of their mouth, that if we extended them through the season they wouldn’t just drop us when the season ended.”
Dolgin also blasted Comcast for not lowering its prices after dropping the YES Network, and alleged that Comcast doesn’t care about its customers.
“Comcast is out doing ads in your marketplace that say a couple of things: We dropped [YES] to protect you, and your costs and your bills and we did it because of a new price increase that YES had asked for … but there was no new price increase … The last price increase that they had paid, and was incorporated into people’s bills, was now over a year ago. It had nothing to do with anytime around November [when YES was dropped]. And when they said that customers were going to benefit from this, and that they were protecting the customer … Well, on Nov. 18 they drop us … [The December] bill then didn’t go down what they claimed was around five dollars a month. The bill actually went up 4 percent. And even more crazy, they have an RSN [regional sports network] surcharge on the bill, to blame RSN’s for prices — they own two of them, so they’re really blaming themselves — [but] they dropped the most watched regional sports net in the country, and they then tripled the surcharge on the bills. Because they just don’t care. They don’t care what customers think. They didn’t do it to lower the customer’s bill, they [did it] to increase their margins. For every dollar they were paying out now they were bringing it in. Every dollar went to their bottom line, because their cost didn’t go up, it went down.”
Dolgin was asked what he sees as the “endgame” if Comcast is picking a fight with local Yankees fans.
“There are two possibilities: One is that every dollar they don’t pay out, and every dollar they can charge to the consumer, increases their margins … The [only] way to get richer is to increase their margins by increasing their price and lowering their cost,” Dolgin responded.
“Number two is that, while YES is the most watched regional sports net in the country, Comcast only has 900,000 regional subs; they’re a small distributor here. And so, if they get into a big fight with YES that’s very public, their downside is pissing off a very small amount of their 25 million [nationwide] subs.
“You can only lose what you’ve got. You’ve only got 900,000 subs, 3 percent of your sub base. So one speculation is that what Comcast is trying to do here is they’re trying to act like the biggest bully in the world, because they’re bullying the number one regional sports network in the number one market in the country. … When the next deal comes up, a deal like NESN … they [can] go to NESN: ‘Look, we shut down the Yankees in New York, we could shut down NESN’ … It’s a win-win if you don’t care about your customers.”
Dolgin was pessimistic when was asked whether a public figure might step in to mediate the conflict.
“I think Comcast is enjoying this fight. They’re enjoying the bully notoriety. They’re enjoying putting money in their pocket. One would doubt if the proper mediator came up, I don’t know if they would do it. But certainly, depending on who it was, we want to get to a table, so there could be some kind of resolution like that again with some public figure, possibly … But I wonder if Comcast would want this dispute settled, because all they would have to do to settle it is literally to flip a switch and put us back on.”
[In interviews in stories like this one, Comcast has blamed YES for the impasse. Comcast originally agreed to pay an increased rate in January 2015 but never formally signed a deal to do so long-term. At a time when both companies were involved in big-stakes corporate negotiations: Fox had recently almost doubled its ownership stake in YES to 80 percent; Comcast was in the process of trying to buy Time Warner Cable, which didn’t end up happening. Since then, Comcast claims to have sought to bring fast-growing costs under control; it argued that YES charges “exorbitant” fees. Comcast says it wants to broadcast Yankees games again but that YES needs to charge less.
[Also, it appears that Comcast has a different version of events when it comes to the additional contractual language referred to by Dolgin. As indicated in this article, Comcast has spun this as YES/FOX attempting to change so-called “most favored nation” language in their contract, that it claims had previously guaranteed Comcast the lowest rates in the marketplace.]
Click on download the above audio file to hear the full episode of “Cannoli Knish Sports Hour.”