Saturday’s broadcast of G-Day will be the last time you see live Georgia football on CSS. The AJC reported last month that the cable-only network will be shutting down on June 1.

The channel started out as something barely a step above local public-access that happened to show replays of football games. Production was spotty and HD wasn’t an option. Over the past 15 years the station grew its inventory of live events but also added team-specific shows like the Dawg Report that fell into a niche between the IMG-produced content and what the larger networks could carry.

The introduction of the SEC Network will take most of the best live content from CSS, and that’s why CSS is packing it in. Most of the games you used to find on CSS will likely be on the SEC Network in the future. We’d expect Comcast to just swap one for the other in the channel lineup when the SEC Network starts broadcasting in August.

We’ll still be losing a bit when CSS goes away. We don’t know how the SEC Network will operate, but Georgia will be competing with 13 other teams (not to mention generic conference-wide programming) for time on the new network. We don’t know if we’ll get replays of all of the games or just those produced by SECN/ESPN. We’ll miss the Dawg Report and some of the other shows that had a local touch. It was even nice to catch the occasional G-Braves game while working around the house.

CSS was also an anchor keeping many (a few?) people from switching to satellite from cable. Georgia content found only on CSS made it worthwhile to hold onto the cable subscription. That value was eroded slightly as more and more content became available on ESPN3, but the presence of CSS was still a consideration for those folks. That presence and motivation to stick around are gone now. No, we won’t see millions leaving Comcast, but it’s reasonable that the cable network will lose a small number of subscribers.