March 29, 2024

Cable TV Dispute Leads Some N.Y. Fans to Buy Tickets

There were portable radios to retrieve, Internet piracy laws to test, acquaintances to beg for a dinner invitation — provided they subscribed to another cable provider. And then there were those who begrudgingly shelled out money for a seat.

“It’s such a short season,” said Kyle Thomas, 42, a Time Warner Cable subscriber from the Upper East Side, explaining his decision to attend Saturday’s game between the Knicks and the Denver Nuggets. “Don’t force me to watch daytime television, recorded.”

Since New Year’s Day, the MSG channels, which carry games for the Knicks, the Rangers, the Devils and the Islanders, have been unavailable to the 1.7 million Time Warner Cable customers in the metropolitan region and parts of upstate New York. Fans in Buffalo have also seen their beloved Sabres blacked out.

The Giants will play the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl on Feb. 5, but generally the winter can be a lean time for a New York sports fan.

The Rangers last won the Stanley Cup in the 20th century, and the Knicks’ last championship came during the Nixon administration. The Yankees and the Mets are still weeks away from spring training, and any hopes for the Jets will have a long wait until next season.

There are college basketball games, sure, but little sign of citywide unity behind a single team. St. John’s University has struggled this year. And the Violets of New York University, ranked 23rd in Division III, have failed to capture the hearts and minds of ESPN scheduling executives.

The blackout has even left some fans to consider the ultimate indignity: turning to the lowly Nets, cable’s only local game in town on some evenings.

“They’re pushing me in that direction,” said Clarence Patterson, 43, a Knicks fan from Brooklyn who has taken to carrying a small radio in recent weeks. Mr. Patterson lives a short walk from the Brooklyn arena that the Nets are scheduled to open next season, he said. Yet the chief obstacle to a defection, he added, was the team itself.

Perhaps the only New Yorkers to benefit from the blackout are the scalpers of Seventh Avenue, scanning the area for targets before each Knicks home game at the Garden.

“It’s a strong market,” one of them said, smiling beneath his wool hat before Saturday night’s game. “People who want to see the game have to come outside.”

Scalpers say that only one force could derail their momentum: the disastrous start to the Knicks’ season. With the double-overtime defeat Saturday, in which Carmelo Anthony, the former Nuggets star, took to the court against his former teammates, the Knicks had lost six straight games, falling to 6-10.

Shawn DeGrechie, 40, from Rockaway Park in Queens, who attended the game with Mr. Thomas, said the blackout of the Rangers, who hold first place in their division, was particularly painful. “People have very few things to look forward to in life,” he said.

He paused at the Garden entryway, staring at the ground. “There’s family,” he said, shrugging.

The dispute has focused on what Time Warner Cable will pay MSG to carry its regional sports channels in a new contract. While some higher-profile games are available to Time Warner Cable customers if they are broadcast on national television, the feuding parties have accelerated their public relations efforts in recent weeks.

The cable company’s employees have worn Knicks jerseys at Time Warner Cable retail centers in the city. The company has also organized a sweepstakes to send 10 fans, and one guest each, to the Knicks’ road game on Tuesday at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C.

MSG has hosted a series of viewing parties at bars across the city — most of which have DirecTV — offering free soda and appetizers, raffles for signed memorabilia, and appearances from former Knicks and Rangers players and team dancers.

But for many fans, driven from their couches, paying for a ticket has proved more palatable.

Jared Kleinstein, 24, a Denver native who now lives in New York, said he attended the game on Saturday in part because the blackout had interfered with his schadenfreude. “We don’t have the opportunity to say ‘I told you so’ to the TV every time Carmelo throws up a brick,” he said.

For his sister, Shane, the blackout has created romantic complications. Her boyfriend recently suggested that they exchange apartment keys. She asked him why. So he could watch the Knicks play, he told her.

“It was only for the cable,” she said, sighing. “But sports brings people together.”

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Google Turns On Charm to Win Over Europeans

Google, the Internet giant, acquired the building, around the corner from the Saint-Lazare train station, for an estimated 150 million euros, or $210 million, and Google employees are expected to move from their current nondescript Paris office by the end of the year.

The investment is part of a campaign by Google to win hearts and minds across Europe as it confronts legal, regulatory and political challenges on issues including privacy, copyright disputes, antitrust actions and taxation. The company is spending hundreds of millions of euros to try to demonstrate that it is a responsible corporate citizen and a valuable contributor to the local economy, not the willful opportunist it is often portrayed as in France.

Google executives said that their strategy had been formulated late in 2009, when they realized that their problems in Europe were more serious than in any other part of the world, with the exception of China, and could no longer be brushed aside with recitations of the company’s slogan: “Don’t be evil.”

“We were hearing from people in government, the media, in our industry: ‘You need to be more of a part of the culture writ large,’ ” said David C. Drummond, the chief legal officer at Google. “We took these criticisms to heart, and we’ve been working to defuse these issues.

“We’re really trying to work with folks in Europe to establish ourselves as more of a local player that is investing in jobs, in facilities, our physical presence, and all the ancillary things that come with that,” he added.

Mr. Drummond said he had adopted the role of Google’s “chief diplomat” in Europe, meeting regularly with politicians, business leaders and regulators. Other top executives, including Eric E. Schmidt, the former chief executive and current executive chairman, and Larry Page, the co-founder and current chief executive, have jetted to Europe to make speeches and to dispense chunks of the company’s $36 billion in cash reserves.

Many of the investments seem to be tailored to align with issues of particular concern to local policy makers and populations. In Ireland, for example, where the bursting of a huge real estate bubble has left the economy in tatters, Google recently acquired, for 100 million euros, the tallest office building in Dublin, buying it from the government agency that is managing bad loans held by Irish banks.

In Germany, where Google is under criminal investigation over whether its Street View mapping service broke laws on data protection, the company plans to open an Institute for the Internet and Society. The center, to be set up in Berlin with an academic institution still to be identified, will study issues like privacy in the digital era.

In France, where Google’s efforts to digitize books and other cultural material have been denounced as cultural imperialism by some critics, the new Paris headquarters will house what Google calls a European cultural center.

Employment is also a perennial concern in France, and Google says it plans to double its French payroll, to 500, over the next two years. Over all, the company plans to hire 1,000 new employees across Europe this year, Mr. Schmidt has said.

“We have been accused of doing these things sometimes only to clean our image,” said Carlo d’Asaro Biondo, a Google vice president who oversees the company’s business in southern Europe. But he insisted that the company’s motives were pure. “All of these plans are ways to show respect to local cultures,” he said.

Google said that the campaign was working, with previously strident critics recently having softened their tones.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France once declared, “We are not going to be stripped of our heritage for the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is.”

But when Google announced plans for the cultural center in Paris, Mr. Sarkozy said he welcomed “Google’s important investment to be made in France, in addition to the dialogue between Google and people who play an important role in the French culture.”

Google cites a series of other successes in recent months. It settled antitrust complaints in France and Italy. It signed book-scanning agreements with national libraries in Italy, Austria and the Czech Republic. It reached an agreement to scan and sell digital versions of out-of-print books from Hachette, the biggest French publisher. YouTube, Google’s video service, signed royalty-collection agreements with music copyright societies in several countries.

Yet potentially far bigger issues remain unresolved. In addition to privacy questions in Germany and elsewhere, Google is being investigated by the European Commission in Brussels in connection with possible antitrust violations. The commission is looking into its dominance of the Internet search business.

Kevin J. O’Brien contributed reporting from Berlin.

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