Yesterday, PFF President Ken Ferree was a witness at a star-studded House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee hearing on competition in sports programming. The impressive witness list also included NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, ESPN President George Bodenheimer, Time Warner President and CEO Glenn Britt, DIRECTV Executive VP Derek Chang and Mark Cooper from the Consumer Federation of America

In his testimony, Ken stated that programming carriage arrangements are best handled by negotiations, not government intervention. Ken was not alone in this assertion. No witness or Committee member seemed to be sympathetic to Commissioner Goodell's claim that distributors were discriminating against the NFL network in favor of their own sports programming.

An archived webcast (which includes Ken being chastised by Rep. Eshoo for an un-related paper we released recently) and written testimony can be found here.