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The pay-TV industry has long envied DIRECTV for its exclusive carriage agreement with the National Football League for its NFL Sunday Ticket. Now, according to reports, the satcaster is eyeing Major League Baseball’s Extra Innings to be the next professional sports programming package only available on DIRECTV.

A recent story in Sports Business Journal said DIRECTV is in advanced negotiations with MLB executives about acquiring exclusive carriage rights to the league’s out-of-market Extra Innings package – a move that authors John Ourand and Eric Fisher said would be “a huge blow to the cable industry” and cause a stir on Capitol Hill. According to the story, unnamed sources from the league and DIRECTV confirmed that the two sides are negotiating a deal that admittedly still has a number of hurdles.

The league has been shopping the exclusive programming bundle to both cable and satellite providers during the past several weeks. Last year, most providers were offering the entire season for about $179.

The article said MLB and cable execs have been frustrated with Extra Innings’ slow growth peaking at roughly 750,000 subs last season and teams were picking up individual payouts of about $2 million each. By comparison, SBJ said, the NFL’s Sunday Ticket had nearly 2 million subs with DIRECTV paying the league close to $700 million per year through 2010.

With Congress offering a sympathetic ear to cable’s recent (and long-term) complaints about DIRECTV’s stronghold on professional football, some industry insiders with close ties to the negotiations for baseball expressed surprise that MLB would try to secure an exclusive deal, the article said.

To ring in the new year, internet service via satellite provider SkyVision expanded its global satellite presence throughout the Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) markets by teaming up with iDirect Technologies – a developer of satellite-based broadband access solutions. Together, SkyVision will use a platform from iDirect enabling the company to sell satellite capacity to virtual network operator (VNO) customers which in turn will allow them to deploy their own networks without assuming the upfront hardware costs, or the ongoing concerns of maintenance and security.

SkyVision officials said the iDirect platform’s flexibility has opened up a wide range of possibilities for the company and will help its customers communicate more efficiently. Use of the technology will be of particular benefit to iDirect’s high-end clients from the oil and financial industries and other global corporations, the company said.

The iDirect solution allows SkyVision to resell its satellite capacity to customers who can then operate their own VSAT network without the cost of buying the VSAT hub infrastructure. SkyVision will lease network capacity to each VNO which can then be managed in any way the service provider needs – including the use of private IP addresses, the company said.

The new solution allows operators to control remote sites and deliver end-user broadband speeds all while only paying for the capacity being used. SkyVision said the VNO package offers all the opportunities of the VSAT industry without assuming the risk, or the upfront investment of deploying a wholly-owned and separate teleport infrastructure.