Fantasy-Friendly RedZone Drives NFL Network Growth

That was the piece we ran on November 19, 2009 profiling the NFL Network's NFL RedZone channel. At that time, the NFL Network was aggressively penetrating households across the nation. Just few months later, the NFL Network is being more aggressive than ever.

The National Football League is now planning to make its RedZone Channel available to cell phone users next season. Viewers would see the same stream of action as the people watching at home as the coverage bounces from game to game.

If this actually happens a number of people are going to be really pissed off.

Does your wife or girlfriend watch football with you on Sunday's?

• We I sure hope so as wives and girlfriend are going to go nuts as men across America will be watching their cell phones on Sundays everywhere from Church to their kids sporting events. There will be nowhere that is off-limits for Sunday NFL Football and domestic incidences will occur all across the land. A nationwide fight for attention will spontaneously break out as ‘significant others' become increasingly insignificant by about week #3 in the 2010 NFL season.

• The executives from News Corp.'s Fox and CBS Corp. are going to cry foul. The two networks each pay the NFL about $1.4 billion each season to air live games on Sunday afternoons and an expansion of the RedZone Channel has the potential to erode the audience for some of its most reliable-and expensive-programming. Are advertisers going to want to pay -up for programming that's also available on the RedZone Channel and own on every one's portable media device too?

For my part, this is really insane stuff. When I was a kid we didn't even have cable TV, that didn't come until 1981 when I was 14 years old where I lived on Long Island, NY. I was a huge Jets fan as a kid, and if they didn't sell out Shea Stadium, the game was blacked out on NBC who had the AFC contract at the time. Forget about seeing teams from around the country, I couldn't even see my home town team.

The NFL still has the blackout policy and there are always few games that get blacked out in local markets when games don't sell out. The Jacksonville Jaguars were the blackout poster children this year. As a result of the economy (particularly in that area), including the pre-season, the Jacksonville Jaguars had nine of ten home games blacked out; but you could still watch the RedZone channel and if you were a big Jaguars fan, you could go to a bar and watch the CBS broadcast.

The NFL Network will now make it so that you will be able to follow every team on Sunday no matter where you are, home or not. If you would have told me this as a kid, I would not have believed you. - Mike Cardano

Mike is the founder of the Around the Horn Baseball Blog and the Extra Point Football Blog.

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