The Direct approach: Cut to the Chase

DirectTV has finally acknowledged an agreement with Major League Baseball to become the sole TV distributor of the sport’s out-of-market package, telling the Federal Communications Commission that the deal will benefit consumers.
“Consumers will receive a better product, with more content and more features,” DirectTV president Chase Carey (pictured) said in a seven-page letter Friday to the FCC, a copy of which was released by Edelman, the company’s public-relations firm.
Company spokesman Robert Mercer said later Friday that the letter was incorrect and should have said that it was a "proposed agreement. There is no agreement as yet,” Mercer said.
The package also has been available on cable television in recent seasons through iNDemand but will be available solely on DirecTV and MLB.com under the new agreement. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) released a letter last month disclosing that the FCC was investigating the deal.
“MLB’s proposed deal with Direct TV for the Extra Innings package is stunning in its disregard for baseball
fans,” iNDemand president Robert Jacobsen said in a statement. “The cable industry offered MLB a non-exclusive deal — with better overall terms than the DirecTV offer — that would allow baseball fans across the country to watch their favorite teams regardless of whether they were a satellite, cable or telephone customer.”
Carey said in his letter that an estimated 5,000 subscribers to the "Extra Innings" package would not have access to DirecTV, noting there were 230,000 subscribers to the package last year outside of DirecTV. He also said DirecTV would make The Baseball Channel available when the network launches in 2009.
“Congress did not prohibit all exclusive arrangements,” Carey wrote. “It only restricted exclusive arrangements that
were the product of market power abuses — those between dominant cable operators and cable-owned programmers.”