A quick, rich Fox has snatched the New York Giants and the rest of the National Football Conference away from more than half of the television audience in Eastern and Northern Maine.

Last week Fox outbid traditional National Football League broadcaster CBS for the right to carry NFC games for the next four years beginning next season. Price tag: $1.58 billion.

What’s a soon-to-be-TV-deprived Giants fan to do? Subscribe to cable TV, assuming you live in an area with access to a cable company that carries a Fox Television Network affiliate. Buy a satellite dish, but first make sure it can pick up the signal from the satellite Fox uses, which sits low on the horizon. Hope one of the local free TV stations opts to pay Fox to pick up the NFC games. Start developing a taste for the New England Patriots and the AFC that signed an agreement Monday to remain on NBC.

“If you don’t have a Fox affiliate in your area, it’s going to present a problem for those folks who don’t have cable,” said Tony Palminteri, vice president and general sales manager of WPXT-TV Channel 51 in Portland, Maine’s only Fox Network affiliate.

The good news for Giants or NFC fans is that WPXT is carried by more cable companies than any other station in Maine, according to Palminteri. Channel 51 is wired into 251,973 homes in Maine and New Hampshire, mostly in Maine.

The bad news is that in the market served by Bangor TV stations, only 47.5 percent of homes receive cable. Of the 123,820 households in this market, according to the most recent A.C. Nielsen figures, 58,815 households have cable which means 65,005 potential Giants households do not. And Channel 51’s airborne signal does not carry this far north.

Between its airborne signal and cable, WPXT blankets the state from Augusta south, according to Palminteri. Viewers in those areas are assured of receiving the NFC games.

North of Augusta, however, Channel 51 and the national Fox Network feed are a hit or miss proposition depending on which cable companies choose to include one or the other on their menus.

A single cable company might offer Fox in one town and not in another.

For instance, United Video Cablevision of Rockland and the Madawaska region boasts 28,000 subscribers in 57 Maine towns, according to UVC General Manager Brian Gasser. But approximately 30 percent of those subscribers in roughly half the towns UVC serves do not receive a Fox affiliate.

Gasser said a delay in Federal Communications Commission regulations is one reason towns not currently receiving Fox might not receive it soon.

“New regulations haven’t yet been released by the government,” said Gasser. “Any channel additions we might do will be on hold until the regulations come out.”

Gasser also said geographical location can affect a particular town’s ability to receive the Fox signal.

“Fox has elected to be on a satellite located low on the horizon,” said Gasser, noting this can prevent some satellite dishes from being aimed low enough to receive the signal without interference.

Palminteri advised people who do not receive a Fox affiliate and who desire to do so to contact their local cable company.

“I’m fairly certain a lot of cable systems that haven’t picked us up will want to pick us up. Call your local cable company. We’re good folks to work with,” said Palminteri.

For those who don’t have access to cable, the possibility exists that a local station – either CBS affiliate WABI-TV Channel 5 or ABC affiliate WVII-TV Channel 7 – could pay Fox to pick up the feed of the games.

“That is a possibility,” said Steve Hiltz, WABI-TV program director. “It’s been done before on a one-game basis. I don’t know what kind of money we’d be talking. We haven’t addressed it at this point, but it is important. We’ll get to it.”