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Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961

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General description

The Sports Broadcasting Act was passed in response to a court decision that ruled that the NFL’s method of negotiating television broadcast rights violated antitrust laws. The court ruled that the “pooling” of rights by all teams to conclude an exclusive contract between the league and CBS was illegal.

The law overturns that decision and allows for certain co-broadcast deals between major professional sports. Recognizes the fact that the various franchises in a sports league, while competitors in the sporting sense, are not so much commercial competitors as interdependent partners, whose success as businesses is intertwined, as some level of competitive balance must exist between them. for any of them to remain a viable business. Thus, it allows the sale of a television “package” to a network or networks in which league members share equally, a procedure that is common today. Of the top five professional team sports in North America, Law is the most relevant to the NFL,

The law has been interpreted to include so-called “blackout rules” which protect a local team from broadcasting competing matches on its home territory on a day when it plays a home game and from having to broadcast matches within its local market. Area that have not been exhausted. It also, in effect, protects attendance at high school and college football games by blocking professional football games locally on Friday nights and Saturdays during those sports’ regular seasons; These measures effectively banned the 해외축구중계 (and, in practice, the playing) of NFL games on those days,

Exceptions

Since then, this part of the act has been partially circumvented; the NFL extended its season in 1978 to allow some weeks of games on Friday nights or Saturdays if the league so desired. Late-season Saturday games have been common ever since, but Friday night games remain extremely rare; the league has played only eight Friday games since 1978, mainly due to the NFL’s Christmas restrictions. In 2005, a matchup between the Miami Dolphins and the Kansas City Chiefs, scheduled for Sunday, October 23 in Miami, was moved to 7 p.m. on Friday night due to Hurricane Wilma. The game was televised only 75 miles from Miami and Kansas City.

College football

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) broadcast packages are not subject to the antitrust exemption and suffered for it, when the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA’s restrictive television policies were a violation of antitrust law in the 1990s. 1980 when the University of Georgia and the University of Oklahoma sued the NCAA over the television restrictions (limit of six television appearances in two years) established in 1952. However, after their court victory, neither Georgia nor Oklahoma made serious efforts to market their own television packages, but instead followed the leader of their conferences, the Southeastern Conference and the Big 8 Conference respectively.

The College Football Association, an alliance of 64 schools from some of the major conferences and select independents, sold its own television package in 1984, first to ABC and later to CBS. The Big Ten and Pac-10 conferences, unaffiliated with the CFA, sold their own package separately, first to CBS in 1984 and to ABC in 1987.

In 1991, the panorama changed. ABC had the CFA, Big Ten, and Pac-10 packages, and NBC had the Notre Dame home package. Once again he was relegated to limited appearances.

The CFA collapsed, and in 1995, the Southeastern Conference signed a national agreement with CBS. They are the only major conference that guarantees a national “game of the week” because ESPN games can come from any of the conferences they offer.

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