Founding
YES is the product of a 1999 merger of the business operations of the Yankees and Nets into a holding company called YankeeNets. One of the reasons that the teams merged was to give them better leverage over their own broadcast rights; each party believed that it would get a better deal individually, if they negotiated the rights collectively. Two years earlier Cablevision, who at the time owned the Nets' broadcast home, SportsChannel New York (later known as Fox Sports Net New York, and now known as MSG Plus), became the sole owner to the television rights of all seven MLB, NBA and NHL teams in the New York market when they acquired the competing MSG Network (previously owned by Gulf+Western, Paramount Communications, and Viacom), which had the Yankees broadcast rights since 1989. This led to monopoly-like tactics, including the shift of some games to the cable-exclusive MSG Metro Channels, which had very limited distribution because Cablevision, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable routinely fought over carriage deals. Cablevision attempted to buy the Yankees outright, but could not agree to acceptable terms with George Steinbrenner and his partners.
YankeeNets discussed multiple options with potential partners to either stay with Cablevision or start its own network. The ultimate decision was to start its own network, ending the five year monopoly that Cablevision had held on local New York sports. The Yankees' success in the late-1990s was a key factor in the decision, as it had become a much more valuable brand than ever before.
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Famous quotes containing the word founding:
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents cant take you and industry cant take you.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“The responsible business men of this country put their shoulders to the wheel. It is in response to this universal demand that we are founding today, All-American Airways.”
—John Dos Passos (18961970)