Dodgers TV channel purchase likely won’t help fans in Southern Nevada

As Charter Communications moves to acquire Time Warner Cable, the pay-TV provider said it will begin televising Dodgers games on SportsNet LA within the next few weeks to the nearly 300,000 households it serves in Southern California.

“We are going to get the Dodgers on,” Tom Rutledge, Charter’s chief executive, said in a story in the Los Angeles Times. “We want the Dodgers to be on every outlet in Los Angeles and … we are committed to making that happen.”

However, it appears that the proposed $57-billion takeover won’t do anything to help convince Southern Nevada pay-TV providers such as Cox Cable and DirecTV to carry the Dodgers’ pay-TV channel — which has been blacked out locally since its inception before last season.

“This development does not change our position,” Cox Communications-Las Vegas manager of communications Juergen Barbusca said Wednesday in an e-mail to the Review-Journal. “We’re open to carrying the channel at reasonable and flexible terms that don’t overburden our customer base.”

Likewise, DirectTV — which is in the process of being sold to AT&T for $49 billion — said in a statement, “We continue to hope TWC and the Dodger front office will compromise with the rest of Southern California’s TV providers so all Dodger fans can watch their games without burdening everyone else with significantly higher fees.”

TWC, which agreed to a $8.35-billion, 25-year deal to carry Dodgers games, had reportedly been asking other pay-TV providers to pony up almost $5 a month per subscriber to carry the SportsNet LA channel. But no other provider agreed to the deal, leaving TWC as the only major provider to offer SportsNet LA, one of the most expensive sports channels in the country.