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...fact, Major League Baseball is so confident of its staying power that it is launching its own 24/7 cable channel in the midst of the country's worst recession since the Great Depression. On Jan. 1, the league, looking to tap into fans' endless demand for stats, scores and late-breaking news on a middle reliever's rotator cuff, will debut the MLB Network, a channel that promises to cover every crack of the bat, in or out of season. (Read TIME's top 10 sports moments...
...satellite providers think so: the MLB Network will debut in over 50 million homes - the U.S. has around 115 million television households - making it the largest pay-TV launch in history. "This is the next step in the evolution of delivering baseball to our fans," says Bob DuPuy, Major League Baseball's president and chief operating officer...
...just baseball's popularity that got it such good distribution right out of the batter's box; the league made a major sacrifice to get into those 50 million homes, realizing that if you can't beat the cable powers, you might as well join them. Unlike the NFL, baseball offered the pay-TV operators minority ownership of the network. Satellite provider DirecTV owns 16.5% of the MLB Network, while the three largest cable companies - Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications - together own another 16.5%. Major League Baseball owns the remaining two-thirds. "We watched the path that...
...price, companies have been more willing to play ball with MLB. Baine says that while the NFL demanded an 85 cents-per-subscriber fee from operators to carry its network, baseball asked for a more reasonable 25 cents. The network will appear on the basic digital tier of every major provider except for the Dish Network. "No one is going to get 50 million homes out of the cable operators again," Brosnan boasts...
Theoretically, even pacificists would probably admit that no one can respond as quickly and efficiently to a major U.S. disaster as the military. But the news that active duty soldiers fresh from a combat tour of Iraq will be gearing up to assist civilian agencies charged with responding to anything from accidental chemical spills to terrorist attacks has sparked mixed reactions from experts in emergency management and civil liberties advocates. (Read "Why Disasters Are Getting Worse...