Just when you thought the comedy of errors known as Bermuda’s TV service couldn’t get any worse, it did over this weekend’s World Cup coverage.

The issue itself is reasonable clear-cut. the Bermuda Broadcasting Company bought the rights to broadcast the tournament in Bermuda and exercised its rights to prevent Cablevision from broadcasting matches on the other channels that may have been carrying the games. Then, on the first day of the tournament, Bermuda Cablevision showed the opening match on ESPN2. Whether this was inadvertent or deliberate is not certain.

But it should be clear that they had no right to do so, and had in fact been advertising the fact that it would not be showing matches except on the BBC’s Channel 7 in the days before the tournament.

The BBC then sought an injunction preventing Cablevision from showing any further matches. To be sure, the order issued by the Supreme Court was not the finest piece of legal draftsmanship ever written since it barred Cablevision from broadcasting any World Cup matches. But the spirit of the order was clear.

Nonetheless, Cablevision chose to follow the letter of the order and promptly cut off Channel 7 and Channel 9 on a subsequent broadcast.

The BBC again cried foul, and Telecommunications Minister Renee Webb was obliged to step in and ordered CableVision to restore the coverage. And there the matter rests, at least for now. There is always plenty of blame to go around when these embarrassments occur; but the customer is always the loser.

Both companies should keep this in mind. Neither enjoys great affection from the average viewer and whenever one of these incidents occurs, it simply drives more people away from their services and towards satellite vendors and, these days, Internet service providers.