Prime Ticket: A Service That Doesn’t Jock Around the Clock

through advertising and from fees collected from cable operators.

The Prime Ticket Network, a regional cable channel serving Southern California and based in Inglewood, is structured similarly.

But Prime Ticket, even though it is on the air only in the evening, is considerably more costly to cable operators than ESPN, a 24-hour service.

ESPN costs operators 28 cents a month per subscriber, plus 9.25 cents for the National Football League package.

Prime Ticket’s monthly fee, which varies from system to system, is about 75 cents.

Paragon Communications, which serves about 50,000 homes in Torrance, Hawthorne, Gardena, Lawndale and El Segundo, is currently in a rate dispute with Prime Ticket.

Prime Ticket suspended service to Paragon on April 8, the night of a King playoff game.

Mark Mongiola, Paragon vice president, calling Prime Ticket’s rates “exorbitant,” said the companies have reached an impasse in negotiations that began almost a year ago.

Simmons Cable of Long Beach, which serves about 54,000 homes, dropped Prime Ticket in February. Frank McNellis, the president and general manager of Simmons, said that Prime Ticket this year would have cost his company about $750,000. “That’s just too much to pay for a service that isn’t on 24 hours a day,” McNellis said.

Last year, many Century Cable subscribers who live in communities on the West Side were angered when their company canceled Prime Ticket. After about a week, Century was forced by irate viewers to put Prime Ticket back on.

Despite the setbacks, Prime Ticket has grown considerably since it began operations in October, 1985.

When Prime Ticket, owned by Jerry Buss and Bill Daniels, went on the air, it was available in 680,000 homes through 11 cable systems. It is now available in 2.3 million homes through nearly 40 systems, making it the nation’s largest regional cable sports channel.

Asked if Prime Ticket is profitable, Buss said: “We initially invested a great deal of money. We have not recouped all of that money. But if you’re talking strictly monthly income vs. monthly expenses, Prime Ticket is profitable.”

Buss said that a lot of research went into the Prime Ticket project. “At first, we were looking into a pay service, but we finally decided a basic service (with no extra monthly fee) was the way to go,” he said.

“The key is to make your service available in as many homes as possible.”

The Madison Square Garden network, the first regional sports channel, is available in about 2 million homes and reaches a national audience. It is carried by only a few California cable systems.

Other regional sports channels include Houston’s Sunshine Network, available in 1.8 million homes; Chicago’s SportsVision, 1.1 million homes; New York’s SportsChannel, 1 million homes; New England’s SportsChannel, 800,000 homes; Washington’s Home Team Sports, 720,000 homes; and Philadelphia’s PRISM, 400,000 homes.

The San Diego Cable Sports Network fits into the pay-per-view category because viewers pay for single events or groups of events. That network, which began operations in 1984, offers 41 San Diego Padres games, plus San Diego State sports and pay-per-view boxing matches.

Bill Grimes, ESPN president, was asked if regional sports channels were competition to his network. He said: “They’re competition, but it’s a good competition. Services such as Prime Ticket attract cable subscribers, and that’s good for us.”

The top sport for Prime Ticket is Laker basketball. The channel carries 26 regular-season home games, plus a couple of home playoff games.

Prime Ticket televises most King road games, plus selected home games, 39 regular-season games in all. Prime Ticket also covers the indoor soccer Lazers and other Forum sports, such as boxing and tennis.

Prime Ticket blends in a mixture of college sports, too, featuring USC, UCLA, Pepperdine, Loyola Marymount, Cal State Long Beach, UC Irvine and other local schools. It also has a nightly horse racing show.

“The key to our success, the glue of the channel, is the college product,” said Tony Acone, Prime Ticket’s president.

Acone said that Prime Ticket carried 243 events in its first year and 380 in its second, and will top that this year.

Prime Ticket offers roughly 1,000 hours of event programming a year, compared with ESPN’s 2,500 hours of original event programming.

ESPN and Prime Ticket have the same major void--no major league baseball. The Dodgers and Angels recently aligned themselves with the new Z Channel movie and sports pay service.

There has been talk of Buss buying the Padres and putting that team on Prime Ticket. “I would like to buy the Padres but territorial restrictions, I believe, would not permit us to put them on Prime Ticket,” Buss said.

Buss, asked if the Prime Ticket venture was going as well as he had hoped, said: “I’d say we’re ahead of schedule.”