Comcast gets name on Mass. concert site

MANSFIELD, Mass. - The Tweeter Center will become the Comcast Center under a naming-rights switch at the outdoor concert amphitheater in Mansfield.

Philadelphia-based cable TV provider Comcast and the center's owner, Live Nation, announced the change today. The switch takes effect tonight for a concert by Eric Clapton.

The nearly 20,000-person-capacity venue, which is about 45 minutes southwest of Boston, has 35 to 40 concerts a year. By midmorning, the center's Web site carried the Comcast name.

The site had carried the name of Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, the Canton, Mass.-based chain of electronics stores that entered bankruptcy protection last year. Tweeter had taken over the name of the Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts in 1999.

The bankruptcy triggered Tweeter to pull out of four naming-rights deals at outdoor concert sites on the East Coast.

In the bankruptcy, Tweeter's assets were sold under a court-supervised auction.

(By the way, a tweeter, along with a woofer, is a component of stereo speakers.)

What had been the Tweeter Center on the Camden waterfront was renamed the Susquehanna Bank Center under a $10 million deal announced Feb. 4.

Susquehanna Bancshares Inc., a Lititz, Pa., bank holding company, had recently opened a regional headquarters along the Delaware River in Camden. The naming-rights contract is for an initial period of five years and is renewable for two five-year terms. Over the 15 years, the value would be $10 million.

Tweeter had purchased the naming rights for the Camden center - which opened in 1995 as the Blockbuster-Sony Music Entertainment Centre at the Waterfront and was referred to by most people as the E-Centre – for an undisclosed amount in 2001.

Tweeter purchased the King of Prussia-based Bryn Mawr Stereo & Video in 1996. And five years before that, Bryn Mawr Stereo, founded in 1946 by a Main Line podiatrist, nearly bought Tweeter.