Mediacom Communications has announced the renewal of its carriage deal with 21st Century Fox for the Big Ten Network.
Terms of the pact were not announced.
A carriage agreement with the Midwestern-situated Big Ten collegiate athletic conference’s regional sports network makes sense, given that Mediacom operates systems in states including Iowa, Missouri and Minnesota.
The MSO’s pay-TV customer base declined 4.2 percent to 842,000 from the end of the second quarter of 2015 through the second quarter of this year, although the rate of subscriber attrition has been flat of late.
The loss of the Big Ten Network during college football season probably wouldn’t have helped that metric.
The deal probably hasn’t enhanced Mediacom’s viewpoint of the RSN business, however.
"Look at the sports team. Who made them valuable? It's us, the cable business that made them valuable, by paying for these 'stupid' regional networks when they should be à la carte. My mother should not be paying for the Yankees,” Mediacom founder and CEO Rocco Commisso told Telco Transformation earlier this year.
Big Ten Network is distributed into 60 million U.S. homes and has carriage deal with every major pay-TV operator.
For more:
- read this Mediacom press release
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