In Baltimore tonight, the Ravens-Browns game was on ESPN. When I flipped to the local CBS affiliate, they had the game on as well, using the exact same ESPN feed, same graphics, same announcers; everything was the same except the commercials.
I know ABC owns ESPN, but why is CBS (a local affiliate, anyway) showing an ESPN feed–effectively advertising for them since their graphic is in the corner constantly? I assume they had to pay a fee to do this, especially since they laid their own commercials on top of ESPN’s. Obviously this is still a profitable scenario for the local station or they wouldn’t do it, but wouldn’t the bigwigs at CBS would get mad?
I’m assuming this station won some sort of contract to broadcast the Ravens games–wouldn’t it make sense to award the contract to someone who was going to send their own cameras and announcers? Is this a common practice in other cities? Could my cable company possibly be behind this?
Since I live in L.A. and there is no such thing as pro football here, I believe that the Sunday night games have to be shown on local broadcast TV stations in the markets of the participating teams.
When ESPN (or TNT, last season, and before) shows a local game, the NFL offers it to local non-cable affiliates in the home team’s city, as well. I think it’s a bidding process, but I’m not sure. I’m sure it’s in ESPN’s contract to give the locals the feed, so that’s what they do.
The local TV station that normally broadcasts the team’s games (for NFC teams it’s Fox and for AFC teams it’s CBS) has the right to pick up the ESPN Sunday night game. (They may also have the right to pick up the Thursday night game when that starts later in the fall.)
We just finished a baseball playoff series here where the local Fox station was showing a playoff game being telecast by ESPN over the ABC Family Channel. Go figure.
Like the other posters, I think it’s an affiliate thing. When I watched Duke basketball games in college, the espn feed was frequently blocked out to give way to the local affiliate CBS’s own crappy broadcast (different broadcasters + broadcast). I’m surprised the espn feed wasn’t blocked out – I guess only in certain instances. But maybe there was a mistake that day, you never know.