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Richardson's group has signed up overseas supporters and planned a series of community dinners and a potluck in honor of the Inauguration. On a recent NFL-playoff Sunday, 11 members gathered in Richardson's brick-lined den to discuss ways to improve local schools. "When we as a group put a package together to send to Barack Obama, what should we ask for?" Richardson posed the question at the start of the meeting. The answers were varied and thoughtful. Why not encourage high school students to get passports to promote foreign travel? Why not sponsor overseas pen-pal programs...
Reid, a five-foot-five, 140-pound astrophysicist, said the difference in estimated size was the cosmic equivalent of him suddenly bulking up to the size of a six-foot-three, 210-pound NFL linebacker...
...other league-owned and -operated sports channels still haven't hit baseball's numbers, and they've been around a lot longer. NBA TV, launched in 1999 but still relegated to the more expensive tier of sports cable channels, has only 15 million subscribers. The five-year-old NFL Network, which has waged mortal combat against cable operators for more favorable distribution terms, reaches just 42 million homes. The subscription revenues from the cable and satellite operators could keep the MLB Network buoyant in a tough advertising market. In fact, most analysts are bullish about the channel. "We expect them...
...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...
...Though other large operators, like Charter Communications and Cablevision, don't have a stake, they agreed to carry the channel after the big boys signed on. Thanks to baseball's rather inexpensive asking 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...