Courtesy USA Today

(July 16, 2010) Viewers flipping to ABC for its usual British Open coverage this weekend will only find this: Taped afternoon replays after ESPN has finished its live coverage — including the tournament's finish Sunday.

The first-ever British Open only on cable TV is hardly an anomaly. Big-time sports popped up for years on cable TV — including MLB League Championship Series games and both NBA conference finals — but now championship prime cuts are joining the cable TV buffet. This fall, all but one of NASCAR's 10-race de facto playoffs — its season-ending Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship — will be cable-only for the first time. So will all five games of college football's Bowl Championship Series, which has never appeared on cable. And ESPN — getting those events — isn't the only cable outlet about to inherit championship action: Through its new joint NCAA men's basketball tournament deal with CBS, Turner Sports next year will air NCAA games on its cable channels, including truTV, whose shows includes World's Wildest Police Videos and Operation Repo.

Does it matter anymore? Broadcast networks — which reach at least 10 million more U.S. TV households than any cable channels — have long argued that big events could reduce their exposure to casual sports fans by going to cable's relatively niche audiences.

ESPN counters that the vast majority of sports fans get cable or satellite TV — such as 95% of viewers that have been watching BCS games on Fox — and that viewers, especially those under 40, don't see any difference between broadcast and cable. And that ESPN's bizarre LeBron James special being last week's highest-rated show on TV — albeit during historically low broadcast network summertime viewing levels — undercuts notions of cable as being invariably niche TV.

Ultimately, where events air is settled by which TV outlets offer the biggest rights fees. And cable, with its additional revenue stream from cable operators' fees, has a big advantage — especially ESPN, which gets an industry-high operators' fee of about $4 a subscriber.

Meaning, old-timers might someday need to tell youngsters that big sports events used to be on TV even before there was cable TV.

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