Little can unite a nation like the Olympic Games. With its finest athletes battling for national pride, a country can come together for a purpose. That pride of citizenship can be multiplied by the ability to watch those games unfold
Little can unite a nation like the Olympic Games. With its finest athletes
battling for national pride, a country can come together for a
purpose.
That pride of citizenship can be multiplied by the ability to
watch those games unfold on television.
This year, NBC has opened three of
its networks, the broadcast station, CNBC and MSNBC to air segments of the 2000
Games in Sydney, Australia. On Kaua’i, however, cable subscribers are seeing
just one of those options, the broadcast station. MSNBC and CNBC events are not
available to the garden island.
The fault, according to Garden Isle
Telecommunications President Bill Harkins, does not lie with his company.
To air the portions of the Games being shown on the two cable networks,
NBC mandated that Harkins purchase a station called Value Vision. Further,
Harkins would have had to sign an eight-year contract with the new station.
“We were going to have to buy more,” Harkins said. “And that would have
meant a rate hike for our customers.
“I was trying to do what’s best for
the masses. Basically, what (NBC) is doing is like blackmail.”
That so
because the network, which did not respond to attempts for comment, tied its
willingness to give island residents full Olympic coverage with the cable
companies’ agreement to buy more product.
It is a similar situation,
Harkins said, to the one recently unfolded by The Disney Channel. The cable
channel, a premium station for years, decided to take itself off the docket as
a premium selection.
“It was either add Disney to your basic channel list,
or lose it,” Harkins said. “So I went around and asked each first-grade class.
I realized, in that situation, it was best to add the channel.
“That wasn’t
the case with the Olympic stuff.”
Kaua’i viewers do stand to miss a
sizeable chunk of coverage, including the highly publicized team sports of
basketball, baseball and soccer. Those events air on MSNBC. Non-traditional
sports like fencing, weightlifting and cycling are broadcast on CNBC.
“I
haven’t gotten too many calls on it,” Harkins said. “But I know there are
people who want to be able to see it.”
Including Harkins. Garden Isle
Telecommunications sponsors a local girls’ soccer team, making it even harder
on Harkins.
“I like women’s soccer, and it’s hard to make a decision like
this,” Harkins said. “But somebody has to put their foot down, or these
companies can just keep buying stations, forcing cable companies to pay for
them and, in turn, forcing us to raise rates.”
A call to the Federal Trade
Commission in Washington D.C. also went unreturned.
