This is sad.
This past Sunday’s Houston Astros vs Cleveland Indians game drew literally a 0.00 rating in the Houston market.
To be fair, there’s some important factors to take into account: 1) The game went up against the Texans’ game and 2) Nielson numbers are calculated through a limited number of meters, in this case 581. So it would be more accurate to state that out of all those meters…still no one watched.
But perhaps the biggest issue in explaining just why no one watched the struggling Astros is a dispute CSN Houston has been waging for a year with different cable carriers. The channel is not carried by AT&T, Time Warner, DirecTV or Dish. It’s available in only about 40% of Houston households.
The report comes via Deadspin:
SNL Kagan predicts CSN Houston will be unable to strike carriage deals until 2014 with Suddenlink, which services the Kingwood area and dozens of other markets across the five-state area, and 2015 with DirecTV. No projection was given for U-verse, and SNL Kagan said a deal with Dish Network is “unlikely,” given its current stance on subscriber fees with regional sports networks.
A former AT&T official recently told an industry conference in New York that “viewer intensity” was so low in one of its key markets – presumably Houston – that U-verse did not fear losing customers if it delayed signing a deal with CSN Houston.
Seems like things won’t be changing for the Astros anytime soon. Oh and by the way, it wasn’t too long since we reported this gem of a story.
Things are only getting worse.