NFL Network Wins Appeal Against Comcast, Is This Good or Bad?

Satellite TV doesn't work well where I live, so I am a cable subscriber. This meant I couldn't get NFL Network until Comcast took over Time Warner Cable in the Houston area. Comcast, unlike TWC, did show NFL Network, but on a special sports tier that cost more money. They were able to do that because Comcast won a court ruling that permitted them to put the network on a sports tier.

Well, yesterday an appellate court disagreed with the lower court in the Comcast-NFL Network dispute saying that the contractual language between the two parties is too ambiguous to rule for either side. From what I can piece together from vague media reports, it appears that the lower court as a matter of contract interpretation decided that the contract allowed Comcast to put it on a sports tier. The recent ruling overruled that saying that this isn't an issue that can be resolved by looking at the contract itself, but rather this is a fact issue that requires discovery and a trial.

It's unclear to me what this means in the short term: Whether all Comcast subscribers will get NFL Network, whether it will stay on a sports tier until the lower court decision is completed, or whether it will be removed off of Comcast all together. A spokesman for the NFL said that this ruling means that "ultimately" all Comcast subscribers will get it like they used to before it was tiered.

I guess this is a good thing for me personally if cable subscribers not interested in a startup channel that repeats the same "America's Game" commercial over and over again has to subsidize my sick NFL habit. Or a bad thing if this causes Comcast to take the NFL Network off of my TV until the two semi-monopolies take their good sweet time to work things out or has a court decide it for them.