What’s the Deal Xfinity? No Marquee Deal Yet

When you scroll over to Marquee Sports Network’s website, Get Marquee Sports Network they proudly advertise how many days, hours, minutes, and seconds there are until the network officially launches. Marquee, the name of the new network covering Chicago Cubs games and other media, is primed to become the sole local provider of Cubs content going forward. This is great news to fans that have fallen victim to blackouts when a game might be on ABC or those who keep playing the guessing game for which channel the game is on.

Sure the network might come with a price hike to your cable bill (within $6-$7 as most assume and a newer estimate suggests they are pitching at $4) but the majority of Cubs fans will be happy to pay it knowing there’s one spot to find almost all games going forward.

But, since Xfinity/Comcast owns the majority of cable subscribers in Chicago and surrounding areas, you’d think they’d be the first to latch onto the network with the most demand in the area? Well… no they haven’t actually.

When you go to the Marquee site to determine if Xfinity subscribers will be able to find Cubs games come March, the answer – right now – is no.

Back in early November, Crane Kenney announced that with their Mediacom agreement they had about 40% of their agreements done.

“We’ve got now about 40% of our carriage done, and those are all multi-year agreements, so that feels a lot better than where we sat when we announced this thing about a year ago,” Kenney explained.

Mediacom gave the Cubs a significant boost to the Iowa market, a market that has been severely underserved with regard to Cubs’ content. This was an important market as the Cubs Triple-A team is based out of Iowa and fan maps indicate there are more Cubs fans in Iowa than any other team.

But that doesn’t answer where Marquee and Comcast are in negotiations. During Kenney’s interview with Mully and Haugh in early-November, he suggested that Marquee and Comcast were just starting to sit down to talk.

While some might think this is alarming, it does make some sense. Comcast represents the largest bulk of cable subscribers in the Chicagoland area. Comcast understands this, Marquee understands this. The negotiations between these two are a lot different from the negotiations with Medicom, DirecTv, and AT&T.

The idea behind a lower, $4 per subscriber rate was so the Cubs could get their network into more homes. With Comcast representing the largest base, they can potentially push that rate lower and understanding there’s more money to be made with more subscribers, the network could budge.

On the flip side, Cubs fans will have no problem jumping ship from Comcast/Xfinity if it means they’ll be able to watch games on TV.

While I am certain a deal is eventually worked out, following other network deals in the past I understand most of the more difficult negotiations come down to the final minute. If I were a betting man, I would expect this one to happen before the season begins, but who will be the first to concede?