Governor of Colorado puts pressure on Kroenke Sports and Entertainment
Nov 18, 2019, 10:27 AM | Updated: 1:18 pm
The ongoing saga between Altitude TV’s Kroenke Sports and Entertainment (KSE) and two of the country’s largest cable/satellite providers took an interesting turn last weekend when an unlikely party weighed in on the debate.
For the first time, the dispute spilled outside the sports world and became political.
Frustrated his constituents who are Comcast or DISH subscribers still can’t watch Avalanche and Nuggets games, Gov. Jared Polis penned an open letter to Jim Martin, the president and CEO of KSE. The governor of Colorado urged the network to get a deal done as soon as possible.
Bring our teams back to our screens! (open letter) @ColoradoRapids @nuggets @Avalanche @MammothLax #copolitics pic.twitter.com/LdWBy8XZWE
— Jared Polis (@jaredpolis) November 16, 2019
KSE has spent months of campaigning to place the blame for the ongoing dispute at the feet of the cable/satellite providers. They even purchased advertising on television, radio, print and billboards urging subscribers to flood their cable/satellite providers with phone calls on KSE’s behalf.
In one public statement, Gov. Polis presented a different point of view. He didn’t publish a letter to either Comcast or DISH, only KSE. That combined with the brevity and tone of the message pointed the finger squarely at KSE themselves.
Clichés tend to have truth behind them, and one of the oldest ones is “there’s two sides to every story.” With his public stance, the governor of Colorado illustrated the other side of this story. After months of spending marketing dollars to depict the cable/satellite providers as the bad guys, suddenly KSE may have to deal with the ire of Coloradoans themselves.
Could the latest development be the push for KSE to get a deal done? Gov. Polis surely hopes so as evidenced by his final sentence to KSE, “This has simply gone on for too long.”
***
UPDATE
On Monday, KSE fired the latest salvo in the dispute, filing an anti-trust lawsuit against Comcast. In short, KSE is claiming that Comcast is using it’s dominance in the cable industry to drive Altitude out of business.
