This Is Not Going to be Good

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=algojFpM7.Ho

Viacom is going to pull their channels off of Time Warner at midnight tonight if they do not come to an agreement and it appears they will not come to an agreement. Viacom owns MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, and Comedy Central.

Viacom wants to raise the rate by 30% the amount that Time Warner pays them to carry their channels. This is the same thing the NFL network did and Time Warner still does not carry the NFL network.

Dan's going to have a shitty weekend if those channels are pulled.

SHIT! We were gonna watch Comedy Central tonight. SHIT!

That sucks. And VH1? NOOOOOOOO!

Man.

We don't have Time Warner cable anymore but truth be told, I wish ours would get rid of some of those channels here.

I wish we could pick and pay for only what WE want. The rest is such a waste and garbage. Gawd TV shows have really sunk low in the past 10 years. All that realty crap has turned kids into selfish greedy brats, women into thinking they DESERVE nice things just for the hell of it and portrayals of men as dumbasses. It's so wrong.

Oh look at me. All moral and prissy.

I agree! I watch VH-1 and Comedy Central a lot more than anything else. This is a New York corporate thing and Dan has nothing to do with the negotiations - he just gets left with the pissed off customers.

This really is just another example of those big broadcast companies wanting more money from the cable companies. I know the cable companies really have a bad reputation but they are being bombarded from everywhere.

Channels like VH-1 and Comedy Central used to PAY TIME WARNER for Time Warner to carry their channels to get the exposure and now they want Time Warner to pay, which means the customers pay more.

Especially in this economy, this is a really shitty thing to do. Apparently Time Warner asked Viacom to give them another month to negotiate and they said no. So you can't tell me that Viacom cares about the customers - they just care about $$$. Now local TV stations are doing the same thing. And to cut it off on New Year's Eve is really shitty.

This whole things sounds familiar. Something like this happened a few years back with them coming to terms in the final hours.

Look for cable rates to rise.

Speaking of Dan and angry customers, Glenn wants to take his company stickers off his truck. They okayed it but he needs a hot air gun.

He says people are stopping him complaining about high gas bills.

He works the pipeline, all he does is make sure it flows.

oh crap. we watch alot of VH-1 and Comedy Central too.
I like Nick at Nite too


This explains why we didnt get our usual cable increase in December. It is coming in January, I guess.

I didnt even know this was going on.

Time Warner is the only game in town around here.
I do like them and dont have any troubles with them but I dont even have a choice other than to get a DISH. I havent heard much good about them

I hope they come to some agreement because those are good channels! The NFL network? Who cares? Not me!

in the paper today, they said they came to agreement. So that is good. Who knows how it will affect our bill though. Here is the article...


Channel blackout averted in cable dispute
Time Warner, MTV reach deal on rates. Wadsworth viewers face separate issue

By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal popular culture writer

POSTED: 02:30 a.m. EST, Jan 01, 2009

Time Warner Cable and MTV Networks reached a tentative agreement early this morning that kept 19 of MTV's channels telecasting on Time Warner systems, including in Northeast Ohio.

The two companies' old agreement was set to expire at midnight. Seemingly stalled talks about a new deal could have taken channels like MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and VH1 off of Time Warner systems. But MTV Networks agreed to a one-hour extension of the old agreement shortly before midnight, and talks went on until the new agreement was reached.

In a separate cable issue, Wadsworth Cable TV managed to avoid losing WOIO (Channel 19) and WUAB (Channel 43) when its current agreement to carry the stations ran out last night. Raycom Media, the stations' owner, agreed to extend the deal with Wadsworth until Jan. 12 so the two sides could continue negotiating.

But the impact of that situation was modest compared to what could have come from the Time Warner/MTV impasse, which affected more than 13 million Time Warner subscribers nationwide

If a new deal had not been reached, fans of programs like The Daily Show and SpongeBob SquarePants have been sent in search of online presentations, recent DVD releases — or a new provider that still has the MTV channels.

While terms of the new deal were not clear this morning, MTV had been seeking about a 25-cents-per-month increase per subscriber on Time Warner systems. Companywide, that's a bump of about $39 million a year. Time Warner said it already pays ''hundreds of millions'' for the MTV channels.

MTV contended that Time Warner has traditionally undervalued its channels. A statement said: ''Americans spend more than 20 percent of their TV viewing time watching our networks, yet our fees amount to less than 2.5 percent generated from their average customer.''

Time Warner, meanwhile, argued that the proposed rate increase was 15 percent more than it currently pays, and unreasonable.

''Christmas is over, but Viacom is still playing Scrooge, threatening to pull its MTV Networks off of Time Warner Cable at midnight tonight unless we ask our customers to pay exorbitant price increases,'' Time Warner Cable President Glenn Britt said in a statement.

Available online

Some MTV Networks shows are available online, so viewers do not need cable to see them and the programs may therefore be less valuable as a cable asset. And rough economic conditions, especially for media companies, may be driving both MTV's push for more money and Time Warner's resistance. MTV owner ''Viacom has been hammered by a stagnant ad market this year, meaning it must rely more than ever on robust fee increases to maintain growth,'' Advertising Age reported.

The intensity of the Time Warner-MTV dispute took some observers by surprise. Locally, Time Warner planned to run a rather routine legal notice on Friday which noted that its agreement with the MTV Networks channels expired ''soon'' but ''we are usually able to obtain renewals or extensions of such agreements, and carriage of programming services is discontinued only in rare circumstances.''

But MTV Networks on Wednesday ran newspaper ads, online notices and a televised crawl about the Time Warner dispute. Over the course of the day Wednesday, rhetoric from both sides was increasingly heated and hopes of a settlement or at least a contract extension were fading. Time Warner even said late Wednesday that it would be issuing automatic credits to customers if the MTV networks went off the Time Warner systems, although the amount of those credits had not been set. Then a deal was made.

We just got a $4.50 hike on our cable bill because of a deal with the city of Shreveport.
What's the deal ??? Nobody knows. There was no explanation in the bill just a reminder to all customers to be on time mailing payments.

Now kiss our ass and pay the extra. Who cares that the cable goes off regularly or that internet service goes out all day.

Last night as we were watching the supposedly final minutes of VH-1 Classic, an ad came on for -- guess what? Time Life Music!!!

Dan thinks the big wigs at Time Warner probably used that as leverage considering that Time Warner (now separate from Time Warner Cable) are one of the largest advertisers on cable TV like Comedy Central and VH-1. And, if Time Warner, Inc. pulled their advertising from the other cable systems (like Comcast and Cox), that would further lower the ad revenue for Viacom.

Time Warner knew that if Viacom pulled their channels, it would hurt Viacom a lot more than it would hurt Time Warner since all their content is available online anyway.