NFL Network Gets a Lift From Ruling

A Federal Communications Commission ruling Friday night gave the NFL Network hope that it might receive a major influx of Comcast subscribers. In its preliminary ruling, the FCC said that the league had established initial grounds for its two leading claims against Comcast, and sent the sides for a decision by an administrative law judge within 60 days. The FCC refused to dismiss the case, as Comcast requested. One claim is whether Comcast violated a commission rule by giving preferential treatment on its cable systems to Versus and the Golf Channel, sports networks that it owns, to the detriment of the National Football League's channel. The second claim is whether Comcast, the nation's largest cable operator, with nearly 25 million subscribers, improperly demanded a financial interest in the NFL Network as a condition for carrying it. If the judge orders Comcast to carry the NFL Network on a broadly distributed digital tier, the cable operator's customers may be able to see some of this season's schedule of eight games. The first of those games is Nov 6.