Baby steps not getting anywhere

So, did you catch the good news from CSTV this week? The channel has reached a new agreement with satellite TV provider DirecTV that expands CSTV's reach by about 6 million homes.

That's the good news. The bad news is that CSTV will still only be seen in about 20 million homes.

That's about 78 percent fewer homes than there are wired into ESPN and ESPN2.

And we don't even have any firm figures on how many homes The mtn. reaches, although we do know it's but a fraction of the 20 million CSTV will have.

What's happened is that DirecTV is putting CSTV on a programming tier that currently has about 8 million subscribers; the channel had been on a tier with only about 2 million COsubscribers.

It's the latest in the series of baby steps for the Mountain West Conference's television partner. (Although, while CSTV co-owns The mtn. with Comcast, not a whole lot of MWC games end up on CSTV.)

As we have all become so painfully aware, however, all we've gotten since last year are a few baby steps. And they're not nearly enough.

I've preached patience. I've gone out on a limb because I never for a moment dreamed we'd have completed the 2006 football season and been midway through the 2006-07 basketball season without The mtn. making it onto a whole lot more cable systems and both (or either!) DirecTV or Dish.

I feel like that limb has been sawed off behind me.

Certainly, nobody at CSTV or the Mountain West Conference dreamed this would happen, either. And it's 20-20 hindsight, but something should have been written into the contract with CSTV mandating that either certain distribution levels had to be reached by certain dates or CSTV (and new partner Comcast) would have to increase its payments to the league.

Maybe then Comcast would have the incentive to get these deals done.

THE DECEMBER DEAL with Cox cable that put The mtn. on systems in Las Vegas and San Diego was the last negotiated directly by CSTV.

Part of the contract that ceded half-ownership of The mtn. to Comcast calls for Comcast to negotiate all future distribution deals. And that includes the still-unconsummated talks with Dish and DirecTV.

Ah, remember the heady days of early September when we were assured — or, at least, it was strongly implied — that a satellite deal was just days, if not hours, away?

THE BEST TV OUTLET for the Mountain West Conference in terms of exposure is clearly Versus, which is available in about 70 million homes.

(We can only imagine in our wildest dreams that that were true of The mtn.)

The problem remains, however, that nobody knows what the heck Versus is. Marketing of the channel has been abominable.

Personally, I like the name. It's certainly better than OLN, which derived from the original Outdoor Life Network.

But when your biggest sports franchise is the NHL, it isn't easy to market. And NHL cities are not, for the most part, hotbeds of MWC fans.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com