One of the great things about modern cable and satellite TV is all of the sports programming now available to subscribers across the country. While 25 years ago you would see a couple of college football games on Saturday and a few on Sunday, today you can literally pick from two dozen or more games every weekend. Even the NCAA Men’s tournament has additional coverage with the Mega March Madness on Direct TV.

Content is king today, and as the saying goes the networks want to deliver as much content as possible to the end user so they can make more money on advertising. Quite a few brand new all-sports channels have popped up over the last few years. A few of the new networks are Altitude Sports, which carries Nuggets from Denver and Colorado Avalanche games, as well as the Big Ten Network and the Mountian, the broadcast home of the Mountain West conference.

Sure these channels are great for folks in certain regions of the country, but disagreements between the providers of content and those who deliver the content have resulted in trouble at times to the customer. Consider what happened last year, the Big Ten Network began broadcasting in 2007, but the network was unable to strike a deal with cable TV provider Time Warner. Customers of Time Warner in Illinois were not able to watch some of the home town teams play because of the carraige dispute. Fortunately, the companies involved came to an agreement before the 2008 season, so customers could remain with with Time Warner instead of having to switch over to one of the satellite TV providers like DISH Network or DirecTV. An important thing to do when considering providers is to consider all factors, comparing DIRECTV against Time Warner.

Out of market sports programming are another consideration for the customer. The Direct TV Sunday Ticket package is exclusive to the satellite TV provider so if you want this football fest, you have to switch. This has left a bad taste in the mouth of some consumers, who don’t understand why a high demand package like this isn’t available to every provider, especially a big company like Comcast. Alternative packages though are more fan friendly, such as the National Hockey League Center Ice and the NBA League Pass, which are available on almost every cable TV and satellite provider. DIRECTV seems to have all of the premium sports packages like the Sunday Ticket.