Finally! Comcast adds missing ESPN properties

You may have already seen that the NFL and Comcast today settled their long dispute over the terms for carrying the NFL Network. But it's another Comcast announcement today, a little more under the radar, that is more likely to please sports fans who use Comcast cable and/or Internet services here in the Pioneer Valley: Comcast and ESPN reached an agreement for the cable carrier to add ESPNU to its broadcasting lineup and, even better, ESPN360.com to its Internet broadband service.

For sports fans, the absence of ESPNU has been a major pain for a good nine months of the year. Comcast has had most of the other major sports offerings; some of it is on pay tiers, to be sure, but at least it was available. That includes the likes of the Tennis Channel and Golf Channel; the channels associated with the major sports leagues here in the U.S.; several Fox Regional Sports channels; two of the main soccer-enthusiast channels, Fox Soccer Channel and Gol TV; and others such as CBS College Sports and Versus.

Oh, and everything from a little sports conglomerate called ESPN, including high definition versions of ESPN/ESPN2, plus ESPN Classic, Deportes, and News....but, inexplicably, not ESPNU. For college football fans, this dialed out a lot of potential watching in the fall, and it only got worse in winter, since ESPN is fond of shifting key basketball games onto the U. Closet UConn women basketball fans in the Valley (and that includes me, except that I'm not at all "closet" about it) have had to deal with a game or two each season being unreachable on Comcast -- hard stuff for a fanbase accustomed to seeing every single game on Connecticut Public TV or the networks. (You think I'm kidding? The uproar was so huge down in Connecticut in 2008 that Gov. Jodi Rell actually strong-armed ESPN into making a key Big East women's tournament game available on free TV because it was stuck on the U, a move she wasn't able to repeat this season.) Now, Comcast subscribers will get all of that, plus lots of cool second-tier sports such as soccer, lacrosse and softball during their seasons.

And that's not even the best part of the announcement. Comcast has long been the one major Internet provider that didn't offer ESPN360.com, which makes a wide range of worldwide ESPN game content available to watch on your broadband computer -- both live and archived. Now, all of that treasure trove of sports will be available to Comcast Internet subscribers for no extra charge above what they're paying now. Hey, who needs a life when they can have ESPN360 instead? (My first hoped-for stop? Some of the ESPN Deportes Spanish-language soccer coverage that doesn't make it to the top-tier ESPN networks.)

Don't go looking for this tomorrow; the joint Comcast/ESPN release says it'll be ready "in time for the start of this year's college football season." But given the swath of the Valley that Comcast covers, it's a certainty that a lot of local sports fans are going to be much happier campers in a few months at most. Now, if Comcast could only add Setanta for us soccer junkies, we'd be all set....