Comcast Corp. was accused of sabotaging a Houston television network it co-owned with baseball’s Astros and basketball’s Rockets so it could acquire the teams’ broadcast rights on the cheap, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The professional sports teams sued Comcast in a Texas bankruptcy court yesterday claiming that the largest U.S. cable operator sought to “financially cripple” the network to drive down its value and make it ripe for a low-cost acquisition. “Comcast did everything in its power to financially impair” the Houston Regional Sports Network so it could acquire broadcast rights to Astros and Rockets games “at a significant discount,” the teams said in the complaint. Comcast and its units deny the claims.
