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Time Warner/Viacom Rift Healed, Pending Details

Posted by timothy on from the idiot-boxers-hit-the-showers dept.

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."

5 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's 2009. Happy new year... by Coopjust · · Score: 4, Informative

    I guess timothy is still living in the year of Linux on the desktop...

    (Ubuntu user here, sorry for the tired old joke :P )

  2. Re:Torrents, Usenet Binaries, Rapidshare, mIRC.... by barzok · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When is cable going to switch to à la carte programming and not forcing hundreds of wasted bandwidth and channels on the consumer?

    I suspect it'll happen as soon as the content providers (like Viacom) do the same and stop forcing companies like TW to take all 20 channels even if they (or their customers) only want 10 of them.

    IOW, TW can't give you á la carte because Viacom doesn't make it reasonable to do so, or doesn't allow it at all. Viacom will get $2.25/subscriber/month regardless of whether all the subscribers take 1 or 20 of the Viacom channels. So why bother with the extra overhead of letting the subscriber choose when it doesn't reduce any costs for TW?

  3. Re:My bill better not go up even higher now. by LtGordon · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Subject by Legion303 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:Subject by DigitAl56K · · Score: 5, Informative

      From the mouth of the TWC CEO:

      Link #1 "Viacom is trying to extort another $39 million annually"

      Link #2 Viacom threatens to block TWC subscribers from accessing their free online content. They not only insinuate this to TWC during negotiations, but apparently also to subscribers using TWC's ISP as evidenced by this screenshot.