The topic of the season in Cable is clearly going to be sports programming costs. Amid the ongoing debate/battle NFL Network is having with Time Warner Cable and other cable companies on carriage of the network and the channel’s broadcast of eight live games, Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts weighed in yesterday. Following a speech in Washington, D.C., Roberts opened up about the pressure of rising sports programming costs. He admitted Comcast is “conflicted” since it owns sports networks, but called it a serious issue and advocated “dialogue.” Noting the flood of new sports networks being launched by pro leagues and regional college conferences, Roberts said, “I don’t know the answer, but I’m here to tell you that I’m worried that there is a sea change occurring, a tipping point, with the amount of new sports channels that are getting created and how that cost gets distributed.” From Multichannel News:

Roberts -- whose company pushed into sports programming long ago -- raised an issue that has soured relations between cable operators and sports programmers in recent years. More and more, operators want to create sports tiers to take pricing pressure off expanded basic and reduce regulatory pressure. Last week, Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin called expanded basic a “tying” arrangement....

Comcast, under pressure from the FCC, caved in last month and launched Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, the pay TV home of Major League Baseball’s Washington Nationals. The MSO raised expanded-basic rates by $2 per month for 1.6 million customers to cover MASN’s cost -- a move that drew negative publicity. Comcast had balked at carrying MASN largely over the regional sports network’s license-fee demands.

Roberts alluded to the MASN dispute by suggesting that in the eyes of regulators, fan access to the games of the home team right now seems to outweigh cable operators’ interests in managing costs.

“There is something different about sports than every other type of programming because of the nature of the product itself. It’s sort of tough to live without because of the localness of the sports,” Roberts said. “If you try to do that [not offer sports], as we well know, that can be very painful.”

He added that he wanted to draw attention to the issue because sports channels are proliferating and driving up bills. New York-area cable subscribers, he said, pay about $100 per year for sports programming, whether they watch sports or not. “I think that’s getting to be a lot of money,” Roberts said.