The cost of watching English Premier League football on CableVision has gone up . . . but the company claims a change in TV rights is at the root of the problem,While viewers purchasing a regular package were able to watch several games on Saturday and Sunday last season, that’s no longer the case.Now the same viewers will have to fork out an extra $22 order to watch the same slate of games on the SportsMax channels.CableVision admitted they had received complaints but explained that after US network NBC obtained rights to show EPL matches,their hands were tied.“Currently, CableVision has three channels that offer coverage of these matches: NBC Sports HD (on channel 416), SportsMax (channel 350) and SportsMax2 (channel 351),” said Terry Robertson, General Manager of Bermuda CableVision.“However, in this case, NBC does not hold the rights to any EPL matches outside the United States and is therefore subject to blackouts, while SportsMax and SportsMax2 offer full coverage of all English Premiership football league matches as they are the rights holders for the Caribbean.“During matches to which they do not own the rights, NBC is required to black out the broadcast and seeks to provide alternate programming. We at CableVision have no control over this process which is controlled by NBC from their transmission site in the US.“As the rights holder for Bermuda, SportsMax and SportsMax2 are able to broadcast complete coverage of the English Premiership Football League matches. These channels are therefore an option for football fans who do not want to miss a match.”Roberts urged any viewers to wished to express their opinion directly to NBC to do so my visiting www.nbc.com/contact/generalThings have changed since the end of last season with Fox Soccer Channel losing the rights to show EPLmatches in the region through Sky Sports, whose sports programme also disappeared from the line-up on WOW’s channel 223 during the summer.“NBC Sports bought the North American rights for all EPL soccer games to be shown, unfortunately those rights don’t apply to Bermuda,” said the WOW spokesperson.“SportsMax bought the rights to the Caribbean which we are lumped in with, so SportsMax sent a letter to us saying that ‘we have the exclusive rights, you have to block out all channels that are showing all EPL soccer programming’, so we have to comply with that. Fox has no rights at all for EPL football, they lost the rights to NBC Sports the end of last season.“It looks like ESPN have some rights for the Caribbean, they were showing games and actually had the game on Monday, but the majority of rights are owned by SportsMax. What NBC Sports does is block out their channels when EPL programming is on and turn it back off when the games are over.“We’re getting calls and e-mails and it really is out of our hands, unfortunately. SportsMax claims that there are going to be more games but we haven’t seen the schedule for the whole season.“We saw this coming, we’ve been in contact with the guy from NBC Sports since it was announced that they had the rights and he warned us that this was going to happen. Most of the games will be on SportsMax2 on 600 which was Fox Soccer Plus. Fox Soccer Channel went away and Fox Soccer Plus replaced it on 223.”