Cliff Edwards

Dish Network’s head of product management said the satellite-TV company would be interested in bidding on the rights to broadcast the National Football League’s Sunday games if rival DirecTV fails to renew its deal.

“It’s the only exclusive still left for TV content,” Vivek Khemka, Dish’s senior vice president of product management, said. “I’d be an idiot to say I didn’t want it.” “NFL Sunday Ticket” has been offered only on DirecTV since 1994, and the two sides are negotiating exclusively to renew the $4 billion agreement, which expires at the end of 2014.

The deal is so critical that AT&T, in its agreement to acquire DirecTV, retained the right to back out of the deal if the contract with the NFL isn’t renewed. In the event talks with DirecTV fail, the league could separate the rights to offer “Sunday Ticket” over the Web from the traditional TV contract, Khemka said.

Netflix’s effort to secure a place for its video-subscription service on Time Warner Cable set-top boxes is on hold now that the cable operator is being sold, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The discussions are unlikely to progress before Time Warner Cable’s $45.2 billion acquisition by Comcast is completed, said the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private. Comcast, which isn’t as far along in its own talks with Netflix, is focused on increasing film downloads and rentals with its new X1 set-top box platform, they said.

“They will not be in any kind of rush to let Netflix on their cable box and cannibalize their business,” said Arvind Bhatia, an analyst at Sterne Agee & Leach in Dallas who has a neutral rating on Netflix. A deal with Time Warner Cable would put pressure on other pay-TV providers to offer Netflix as well.

The video-streaming pioneer, with 44.4 million online subscribers, has pitched its Web-based trove of original shows, movies and older series as a must-have for pay-TV providers who increasingly poach each other’s viewers for growth. It has signed two European cable services and is trying to reach deals with smaller US outfits that use TiVo set-top boxes. Discussions have included the possibility of Netflix paying fees to pay-TV providers, Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings said in an interview in late January. While Netflix can continue to grow without such deals, access on cable TV systems would make viewing easier by eliminating the need to toggle between cable and Internet services, Hastings said.