The low rumble of angry fans who won’t be able to watch this week’s Packers Cowboys football game will be a roar by game time Thursday. Tens of thousands of football fans will pack local bars and living rooms of friends with DirectTV to watch the game on NFL Network.

All season long the NFL has e-mail blasted fans in attempts to pressure cable operators into offering the channel, and to do so as part of their basic package. More recently the league has stepped up the propaganda war, with a website (iwantnflnetwork.com) encouraging cable subscribers to cancel their service altogether.

In the four years since NFL Network launched it has reached agreements with a handful of cable small operators, it is now in 35 million homes, most of those DirectTV households but the largest MSOs, Time Warner, Comcast and Cablevision have held out.

It isn’t easy launching a cable network, MSOs have tremendous power creating very high barriers to entry. Time Warner knows fans will pay for a premium tier to get NFL Network. They’re not willing to up their basic rates by the $.50-$.75 per subscriber the league wants, nor are they going to add the channel, keep the price steady and take a loss.

Add these pressures to the cost and scale of putting together a 24-hour network in one of the most competitive areas of television and it’s easy to see why MLB and the NHL have stayed away from getting into linear cable biz. Exclusive content will only get you so far, and ESPN already does it so well.

Unless you have the leverage of another successful network or content so desirable that it is inconceivable that people would not get it (and short of a new genre of content that’s hard to see happening) there is very little reason to start a basic cable channel anymore.

Online video has become the new basic cable, offering an outlet to deliver content to a mass audience at a fraction of the cost of a linear network. Cable subscribers who wish to watch Thursday’s game will pay for a higher tier to watch it, and cable operators are happy to wait until the NFL figures this out.