More Miners Metro

Looks like Miners fans will be able to watch every single basketball game UTEP plays the rest of the regular season, especially the road games.

MetroSports Southwest, Time Warner Cable Ch. 24, usually has the next-day replay of home games -- and they will for Houston and Tulsa, too, in association with UTEP/ISP's radio network -- but they're also bringing the rest of the Miners' away action. 

Metro's association with CBS-College Sports means UTEP's game at Tulsa will also be on Metro (2/20), as will the game at SMU (2/10), Southern Miss (2/24), and at Marshall (3/2).

Time Warner's digital subscribers can hook up Miners games whenever they want for free with MetroSports On-Demand, Ch. 832. They usually keep about a month's worth of games.

Comments

[RoOsTeR]

Bout time!

[Rob]

yeah well thats great and all but leaves out everyone with satellite TV..and thats a lot of Miner fans
Time Warner's service and programming suck..no way I will ever go back to cable.

Maybe someone will figure out how to get the games on network or an over the air station so everyone has access to the TV games...and people wonder why fan support has waned in recent years..this is ANOTHER perfect example why.

Shortsightedness at its finest!

[javi]

i live in dallas tx but i watch every miner game through cbs sports.com it cost $15 a month but its worth it.

[juggernaut]

Awww... sucks for us that have Direct Tv i guess..

[The Chuck]

Whatchu all talking about willis?! I have DirecTV and get both CBS College Sports AND Metro Sports SW. Check your listings or get a better package homies!!

[Grass]

Sweet! Thanks for the info, Duke. This is great news. Nothing against Tiech, but watching the game is infinitely better than listening to a game on radio. By the way, I thought that we COULDN'T watch any games for UTEP because of our contract with CBS CS TV? How did we get that changed so that we are now able to see these games?

[Duke Keith]

Grass,

The problem was that UTEP had to buy the rights back from CBS-College Sports to do it themselves. It sounds weird on the surface, but every conference worth a crap has a TV deal with networks that would exclude them from putting on their own telecasts. C-USA isn't a national conference, but CBS-CS recognized the value in local and regional TV rights, so that's what they bought.

Same thing would apply for the Big XII, albeit on a larger stage. If Texas wanted to put on their own telecast, they'd have to call the conference office and then get the okay from ABC, ESPN, Fox Sports and probably some piddly little Jefferson Pilot kind of network that bought in, just in case a TV crumb fell off ESPN's plate for them. All those networks would have to say they did not want to televise the game before Texas would have permission to do its own thing.

It's why C-USA is better than the WAC, whose TV deal is probably STILL not worth as much, even after Boise State and Hawaii busted the BCS (I don't know the WAC's numbers).

Sure, UTEP doesn't have the same ability as it did in the WAC to put on its own show, but they're also getting close to half a million bucks a year from CBS-CS for their local TV rights. That's not including their slice of ESPN pie for primary national rights, either.

As for why it's easier for Metro, it's because CBS-College Sports programming is aired on Ch. 24, so Metro gets access to their local TV rights...IF Metro can afford to provide the programming. Now that UTEP's winning, there are more sponsors, which means more money, which means more TV for everyone!

Clear as mud? Good!

[Russ K]

@ The Chuck. Metro Sports SW is not on Direct TV. Don't be getting people's hopes up. It is a cable exclusive like the very exciting City 15 and El Paso Instructional Channel 14.
Folks, as a fan I must remind you that there are many cool sports establishments with TWC.

@ Grass. CBS-S doesn't prevent the telecasting of road games and not even home games! Lack of money for someone to produce them does. The games will be on cable this year because Duke and I have made it happen. Over the past 4 years cable tv has jumped through hoops to bring you all the games possible either through affiliations with CBS-C, Texas Tech Network and Comcast Sports and our own productions. This at a time when nobody else could or would touch 'em.
That includes that horrid Syracuse tourney where I took a $20K bath and the people who promised to come to the plate and help with the cost chumped out! I won't name them, but I will not forget either.
'nuff said.

[Duke Keith]

Rob,

There is no guarantee for fans that they'll have television for everyone. The problem nowadays is that it's rare for an over-the-air station to be able to tell its network that it's not going to air their national programming for a local sporting event.

Credit KVIA, they did it once in primetime (the other game was in the afternoon, remember...a lot easier to tell the network to shove off), but I doubt they could do it more than two or three times a year.

That's the unfortunate TV reality these days -- networks demand that their programming take precedence. It's also why entities like MetroSports usually hold the rights to televise games.

Go to any large city and many of the professional franchises for anything except the NFL (because they have national TV deals ONLY) are televised on that city's version of MetroSports. Local cable excels here, because local cable companies are usually the only ones with an actual local office. MLB, NHL, NBA and MLS -- if they have a local TV deal, it's with the cable company because everybody else is locked into networks.