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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."
I guess timothy is still living in the year of Linux on the desktop...
:P )
(Ubuntu user here, sorry for the tired old joke
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.
Now its time for an alternative source of revenue. Unfortunately we are the ones who are going to pay for it as Time Warner and others have shareholders to meet and need to raise the price.
Thank god I do not watch TV that much anymore thanks to the internet. Maybe that is a good thing as some tier packages are approaching $100 and its ridiculous.
People unfortunately will pay big bucks for entertaining as witnessed from cell phones and TV packages. So why not charge more?
http://saveie6.com/
You may not personally watch any of the Viacom channels but I guarantee you that a very large portion of homes with TWC cable service do watch them. We're talking at minimum all Nick, VH1, MTV, and Comedy Central channels.
Viacom knows this and has TWC by the balls. The last few days all of these channels had non-stop banners that made it sound like the big bad giant CableCo was going to cut the channels out of spite. In my opinion, TWC seemed to have done about as well as they could in the business sense: they held out as long as they could without incurring a loss, and probably made the best deal they could get. Remember, this is a business, i.e. having "balls" just as often means getting kicked in them.
"The companies stated the terms of the deal were not disclosed."
I'll field this one. Viacom extorted a shitload out of TWC for the privilege of keeping the channels. For its part, TWC has agreed to rape its customers with even less lube to make up the difference.
Anyone remember icravetv.com back in the 90s. They were in Canada and used to stream ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and a few others. At the time under Canadian law it was legal for companies to redistribute content as long as they didn't alter it. The law was intended to help rural areas. The idea was that as long as you weren't altering the content, the content creators benefited because they could reach more viewers and thus charge more for commercials. As much as I hate TWC why should they pay Viacom anything for increasing the viewer base.
TWC should only have to charge people for the pipe not the content. We watch commercials to pay for the content. I understand paying for premium channels but paying for ad-laden channels that fill most of cable is ridiculous.
BTW I seem to remember that one of the networks had icravetv.com shutdown prior to the super bowl because it would diminish the value of the event. I don't know how letting everyone who wants to watch commercials hurts you but then again that's my whole point.
Actually for about 15 minutes NickJR went dark for not just Time Warner (roadrunner) customers, but apparently all of the US. There was no content and a message about a dispute with Time Warner being the reason they removed the content. I tried several different ISPs across the country (VPN/RDS/etc) and all of them were blocked, including Verizon, which had nothing to do with this dispute.
So, it appears that Viacom was ready to take their ball and go home, so to speak. I can only assume that after the millions of complaints and lost business they would have turned it back on for other ISPs and just blocked TWC/RR, but still, it's a scummy thing to do.
Well, I think the more important point is that this represents the definitive end of net neutrality
Is your concept of Net Neutrality that content providers are FORCED to allow access to content from anyone with an IP? Are you seriously saying that no content provider should be able to block access to whomever they like for whatever reason they like?
Remember we aren't talking about TWC (the ISP) blocking or even slowing access to anything.
By Bye DOS prevention mechanisms, for one thing...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.