After last week’s announcement of the formation of C-SET, the Charlotte Bobcats’ regional sports TV network, headlines focused on the fact that in order to watch 60 Bobcats games, you’ll need a digital cable hookup. That’s still true, until C-SET signs up other regional cable outfits to run the channel, and sells a smaller package of games to a Charlotte broadcast station.
But C-SET (which stands for Carolinas Sports Entertainment Television) raises other questions, despite a gee-whiz video presentation that unveiled the C-SET logo and the potential sports entities that might be included on the channel, like the Charlotte 49ers, the Southern Conference and Charlotte Sting, to name a few.
Why not just sell rights to a local TV station, like the Hornets always did? Bottom line is that instead of giving up the ad revenues from games to a broadcaster that will buy the package and produce the games, Robert Johnson and company have decided to bring it in-house and control the product, while bringing more minor sports, like minor league baseball, hockey, and even high school events under the tent, to try to make even more money.
But the comparison being made between C-SET’s intentions and what the New York Yankees did with the creation of its own network doesn’t wash. The Yankees are a longtime hot commodity in the nation’s largest media market. The Bobcats are a still-unknown commodity in a medium media market in an NBA universe where attend- ance has been in a slump along with TV ratings. Do you know anyone excited about this team?
And not to state the obvious, but how can you have a regional sports network without big players like the ACC, Carolina Panthers, and NASCAR? Though the Bobcats’ press release listed those behemoths among the dozens of “potential programming sources,” big sports fans here will have to see those entities way before they’ll care about Carolina League baseball and horse jumping.
On the other hand, wasn’t this how ESPN got started?
A note from radioland: Chuck Boozer is out, and Ken Buckner takes over the afternoon drive on WKKT-FM. Kat Country tells us that Buckner comes to Charlotte from hot country station “The Wolf” in Dallas, TX.
Stay tuned.
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2004.
