Congressman Courtney wants UConn 1st round game on Channel 3

[Bill-in-CT]

Eastern Connecticut Congressman Joe Courtney sent letters to the presidents of the NCAA and CBS asking that Thursday night's first round UConn game be shown over the air here. The game is scheduled for TNT, and this is the first year CBS is sharing March Madness rights with TBS, TNT and truTV.
http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/42114754/ns/sports-college_basketball/

 

[MarcB]

Joe Courtney can kick rocks. Only a small handful of regular season UCONN games are on CBS. The rest are on ESPN, ESPN-U, and SNY. SNY picked up the games since no local OTA station wanted them.

 

[DToTheJ]

Hey, he's in Eastern Connecticut... If he really wants to do local broadcast television a favor, he'd get someone to pry Channel 26 away from Paxson and bring it back to its glory days of WTWS... but I digress...

If he is able to pull this off and the UConn first-round game (which in my view is still the first round regardless of the games that were played the last two days) then politicians from places such as Kansas will be coming out of the woodwork requesting the same.

 

[Sammi Brie]

That said, CBS affiliates should really be able to request a "swap" of a local game with another network...

 

[radiolives]

That said, CBS affiliates should really be able to request a "swap" of a local game with another network...

Regional coverage of a game doesn't matter in this deal which I am surprised. As I feel it should. Wonder why its not.

 

[KeithE4]

That said, CBS affiliates should really be able to request a "swap" of a local game with another network...

Regional coverage of a game doesn't matter in this deal which I am surprised. As I feel it should. Wonder why its not.

Because close to 90% of the potential viewing audience has cable/satellite, high-speed internet service, or both.

I hate to sound harsh, but those who have neither - i.e. only get OTA TV and don't have a PC or just have a dial-up connection - are of no use to the networks and their advertisers. They're either too old, too poor, too rural (yes, even in the case of flyover-country-friendly CBS), or flat-out too stubborn to come into the 21st century.