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During more than 17 years in his job as Commissioner of the National Football League, Roger Goodell had never testified in court during a trial. That changed last month, when he was called by the league to testify in the Sunday Ticket class action.
His comments covered 113 pages of the 2,506-page transcript. And it was largely uneventful, mainly because: (1) he didn’t have as much personal knowledge about Sunday Tickets as other witnesses who were directly involved in the negotiation of the deals with DirecTV; and (2) everything he said meshed with the bulk of the testimony that came before him.
In a nutshell, the league insisted it didn’t set the price for Sunday Ticket. The league also conceded it was a premium product, one that was intended to complement the games available at no extra cost on CBS and Fox in all markets throughout the country.
“Sunday Ticket, that’s a supplemental package,” Goodell said. “It’s a complementary package. That’s not intended for every — a fan. They get the fan — the fans get the broad audience, and the games are selected by CBS and FOX on Sunday afternoon. Obviously, the Sunday Ticket has whatever games are not assigned to our network partners on Sunday afternoon in those two windows. We want to make sure that that doesn’t infringe or hurt the availability of us to reach that broader audience on Sunday afternoon on CBS or FOX. . . . [I]t can impact negatively on our broadcast networks, so broadcast networks are very concerned about the impact on them in reaching the broader audience.”
Along the way, Goodell also said (as noted by the limited coverage of the trial as it was happening) that NFL Network got out of the business of producing Thursday Night Football games on its own because it wasn’t good at it.
“[W]e weren’t putting as high quality a production and — and feed to our fans,” Goodell said. “I felt that it was not — it was below the standard the networks had set, which I think is a very high standard, but our job was to…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/sunday-ticket-trial-day-8-042739511.html
Author : ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports
Publish date : 2024-07-28 04:27:39
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