League commissioners are expressing concern over Altitude TV dispute

With just one week remaining until the Nuggets’ regular season opener, Altitude COO Matt Hutchings said there’s been “positive activity” over the last few days in talks between the station and big three television distributors.

Altitude and one distributor have recently discussed a long-term agreement which would run for longer than one season.

“We are in active conversations with a company, which is good because as I’ve said before it’s been hard to get some good faith engagement,” Hutchings said. “We’ve been talking to everybody. We’ve been very proactive in our communications and it’s nice that we’ve gotten some reciprocity in that we’re getting some good conversation back. I think that’s a positive. Obviously, we’re cautiously optimistic because we don’t want to get everybody fired up and then if things change. The good news is we are talking to a group.”

Altitude’s contracts with Comcast, DIRECTV and Dish Network expired over a month ago leaving many Colorado Avalanche fans unable to watch the first few weeks of the NHL regular season which began in early October. Fans have been blacked out from watching Nuggets preseason action as well, including Monday’s game in Phoenix which was scheduled to be Altitude’s first broadcast of the season.

The situation has commissioners from the major sports leagues concerned. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman visited Denver last week and stressed the need to get a deal done quickly.

“What’s happening in Denver to the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Rapids, and Colorado Mammoth is obviously very, very concerning to the league and the commissioners, and they’ve stated as much,” Hutchings said. “We certainly have been in communication and contact with them and they want us to get this deal done as fast as possible on behalf on the fans.”

If the two sides don’t come to an agreement, Altitude is looking at every avenue available to them to get their games available to fans. They’ve discussed streaming options as well, however those aren’t financially feasible at this time.

But Altitude doesn’t believe it makes sense for a regional network of their size to trail-blaze a new path when it comes to local sports broadcasting.

“We are one of the smaller regional sports networks in the country, geographically and who we serve in terms of number of households, so I don’t think it makes sense for us to be looked at as the ones to pioneer when the model doesn’t exist yet. Having said that, we have talked to companies out there. And talked about what can we do? How can we do it? Are there ways that we can structure a business relationship that would make sense not only for our partners that we work with and carriers but also for us as a business which supports the business infrastructure and feeds back up and supports the teams.”

Talks between the station and big three carriers are ongoing in “real time” and went on throughout last weekend.

“We need to get to the table, we want to get to the table,” Hutchings said. “We want to get the dialogue going with these carriers and we need to get them to get the games back. Because they control when these games can get back on the year, that’s the bottom line. They’ve taken the games away from the fans, they can control giving the games back to the fans.”