Slashdot Mirror
Time Warner/Viacom Rift Healed, Pending Details
jwilcox154 writes "Yesterday a dispute over fee hikes had threatened a damaging blackout at a minute past midnight Thursday that would have prevented TWC subscribers from watching their favorite shows such as 'SpongeBob SquarePants' and 'The Colbert Report.' The two sides reached an agreement on Thursday, the first of January 2009. The companies stated the terms of the deal were not disclosed. Details must still be finalized over the next few days."
How much do you think Viacom will be paying to distribute its commercials to Time-Warner subscribers?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I have Time Warner Digital Cable, have had it for years, as Time Warner has a true monopoly on nearly all of the areas in Central and Upstate New York that I've lived in. My NYC apartment as well has Time Warner Digital Cable as well as getting a phone line and internet package was a cheap deal at the time and still is.
But have I turned on my cable boxes in the last two years? Not really. Everything I watch is downloaded or streamed on my PC. Instead of watching Major League Baseball, I use MLB's official MLB.TV video and radio streaming service. Episodes of LOST, South Park, Robot Chicken? Torrents usually. Some of them pirated, some I pay extra for. Either way it's still the same programming but different media.
Time Warner could literally blackout 99.9% of the channels (with Digital Cable I get over 500 channels of pure crap) and it wouldn't affect my TV viewing habits because I've made a complete transition to viewing media on my PC (or using VGA out to my HDTV) rather than from a cable box.
Even with HBO On-Demand that I pay for I still prefer to download episodes of shows or movies from the internet and just run them off my Laptop or my PS3's hard drive and onto my HDTV.
When is cable going to switch to à la carte programming and not forcing hundreds of wasted bandwidth and channels on the consumer?
What sense does it make to offer me 1000 channels, that's 1000 x 24 hours of programming a day...who has the time to watch that? Melchior? The Nu?
Give me à la carte or give me death. I'll pay for my cable as 'stealing' HBO without paying for it is not cool in my book, but the box remains unplugged so far in 2009.
Viacom played a little dirty. The Time-Warner phone number in that screenshot (which was also shown on a crawl across all the Viacom channels the evening of the 31st) is the RoadRunner trouble reporting number. Nice of Viacom to dump on the RR help desk, who arguably didn't have any part of this fight.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
My wife decided to call Viacom and complain about their demanded 22-36% rate increase. The minute the woman heard her say "I'm a Time Warn...", my wife was switched to a recorded message blaming Time Warner for the whole mess and giving a Time Warner number to call to complain to. In other words, Viacom didn't want to hear any complaints and was trying to direct the ire of subscribers back to Time Warner.
Time Warner employees, however, saw my wife complaining on Twitter and gave her information on who to contact in Viacom. They also told her that it was unlikely that they would answer though as they had taken off until Monday morning. In fact, when Noggin and the rest didn't go black at 12:01am, we wondered if they were all just out of the office and forgot to leave someone there to shut the feed off.
Instead, it looks like Viacom asked for 22-36% and "settled for" 15%.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.