We are getting confused again so I shall go over this all again and in more details.
InDemand is a company that is jointly owned by several cable companies such as Comcast, Cox, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks to name most.
InDemand owns several programming offerings that I'll list below.
InDemand has many of the PPV and PPV On Demand offerings cable company customers enjoy today.
InDemand also owns InHD and InHD2.
InDemand also owns many of the PPV sports packages that I'll list below.
NBA League Pass.
MLB Extra Innings.
MLS Direct Kick.
NHL Center Ice.
Nascar InCar.
Howerd Stern On Demand.
Now all the cable companies pretty much offer InHD and InHD2 along with the PPV movie and sports offerings.
DirecTV and Dish Network have contracts in place for those sports packages as these contracts were done before all this InHD stuff. DirecTV and Dish Network use other companies for PPV movies. I know DirecTV uses blockbuster and I don't know what Dish Network uses. So its no suprise that Voom never got the sports packages nor the two InHD channels. Its also no suprise that DirecTV and Dish Network don't carry the two InHD channels either.
Because Verizon is so new they now have to deal with InDemand to not just get the two InHD channels but also to gain access to the sports subscriptions that all the companies have today. As long as these cable companies can keep Verizon from offering these sports packages they can never really compete with the cable companies. This gives you an overview of the InDemand issues.
Now onto the RSN issues at hand. Today the cable companies have a little loophole in the law they are using that says as long as a channel never touches a satellite it can be withheld from any company that must use a satellite to feed it to customers. Now nearly all channels today are "hosted" on a satellite which all the companies such as Comcast and DirecTV pick up using their satellites so they can feed these feeds into their systems and offer them to their own customers.
Very very very very few channels aren't hosted on a satellite. As long as the channel is hosted on a satellite it cannot be withheld from any company and every company must be offered the channel at a fair market value which is most likely the same type of contract existing companies have.
So all InDemand channels are hosted on a satellite and as such cannot be withheld from any company and they must also price it fairly. The issue is this. InDemand is offering a very similiar contract to DirecTV, Dish Network and Verizon as they are offering to Comcast and such. But this is the real issue below.
The contracts states that each company must pay a set fee for a group of customers. So 200,000 customers or less would be charged on lump sum that DirecTV for example can devide between all their customers to get the per customer cost. InDemand has setup their pricing system to help cable and hurt all digital customer offerings. Because these cable companies still have many customers that are analog only these customers don't count. So Comcast might only have 15 million digital customers but they can spread this total fee over their entire 21 million customer base. Why do you think they don't offer an HD Package.
So DirecTV might pay the same exact amount as Comcast for their 15 million customers but because all of their 15 million customers are digital they must spread this amount between 15 million customers which means a much much higher per sub cost than Comcast. I hope you see the issue in this. Also to directly hurt Verizon they are also now pricing their sports packages on this model. Because Verizon is the only company involved in this mess with the sports packages they are the only company severely hurt by this practice. So Verizon is being charged based on their count of digital customers and the more they have the higher per sub cost they will eventually have. Again the cost isn't based on how many people order the package its based on how many people have access to the package. The more that have access to these packages the more money overall Verizon must pay for these packages. This means they must charge much much more to customers ordering each package to offset the added cost compared to Comcast for example.
Now to finish off with the RSNs. For the few RSNs that aren't hosted with a satellite such as a Comcast Sports Net this is the issue at hand. These few CSN sports channels are sent from the stadium via a fiber feed directly into the Comcast cable system and because they never touch a satallite they are exempt via this loophole from offering this feed to another company that must use a satellite to offer it to their customers. This keeps DirecTV, Dish Network and Voom from getting these channels and nothing that has happened to date will change this unless the loophole is closed. Now with Verizon they are a different story because they can accept a fiber feed directly from the stadium and offer it to local customers without touching a satellite so Verizon unlike DirecTV cannot be withheld from those channels. This has never been a problem because very very very few markets up until now have had a second hardwired providor serving their area. Also keep in mind that very few areas have RSN channels that aren't hosted on a satellite to start with.
I hope this gives you all a better understand of this entire situation and also to avoid confusion.