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ABC Pulls Channels From Cablevision
wkurzius writes "Cablevision and ABC have failed to come to an agreement after two years of negotiations, and as a result ABC has pulled all their channels from the Cablevision lineup. The dispute is over $40 million in new retransmission fees that Cablevision says they won't give to ABC. On the other side, Cablevision has been accused of not being fair to their customers despite pocketing $8 billion last year. 'The companies immediately published press releases Sunday morning, blaming each other for failing to reach a deal. Cablevision subscribers on Twitter expressed their frustration, saying they shouldn't be deprived of ABC shows, including the Oscars on Sunday, because of a multi-million-dollar deal gone awry. Competitors such as Verizon Communications took advantage of the dispute. The company launched television, newspaper, and online ads offering Cablevision customers speedy installs to subscribe to its FiOS television service along with $75 gift cards, highlighting a fierce war for subscribers in the valuable New York market.'"
People actually watch the oscars?
Who wants to watch an entire industry of false people pat themselves on the back for
another record breaking year of unoriginality, mediocrity and bullshittery?
Sure I'll take that deal - WHEN YOU MAKE FIOS AVAILABLE IN MY @%&#! NEIGHBORHOOD!!!
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Al la carte, please.
You want to know why your cable bill is so high? This is why. Cable stations (and now network stations) charge cable companies to carry their channels. So they get paid whether you watch their content or not!
It is these deals that keep things like Hulu from happening because why would a cable station offer their program for only advertising revenue online when they can get fixed monthly revenue plus advertising over cable/satellite.
And this is why your cable bill is so high. You are paying for channels whether you watch them or not. And due to big bundles, you're paying for a lot of them.
Meanwhile, the cable (and satellite) companies make these big bundles so they can hide the cost of carrying these channels by making you think you're paying for breadth of content. Mostly, you're actually paying most of it for 5 ESPN channels! And that's great if you want to pay that much for ESPN. But the rest of us need more choice.
Each channel should be individually tallied so you know how much you're paying for each channel. If you feel the channel is worth the price, you pay for it. If you feel it isn't worth it, you can not pay for it. And if enough channels don't get picked up by people, they will realize they can't just get free money, they have to provide content people want to watch, and once they do that, they won't care if they get their viewers from cable companies or Hulu.
This would be preferable to seeing larger and larger bundles pushed on us.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I skimmed the article, and the summary seems pretty good. So, isn't ABC still broadcast over the air? I didn't see a list of the other ABC channels, but most everything focused on the main ABC one like Lost, Good Morning America, Oscars, etc.
Also, this seems to be a trend with ESPN and other companies and cable providers having standoffs. Yes, I'm one of those that got rid of cable and haven't bothered with hooking an antenna to my TV. Even with a DVR, the commercials and lack of good content just makes watching too much effort (and cost) for the reward.
And no one even noticed.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you're going to tell the story at least get it right.
Virgin was about to launch competing channels to Sky One-Three and Sky didn't like that too much and tried to up the cost and Virgin didn't back down and just pushed forward their launch. As a result all of the "free" Sky channels got pulled (Sky One-Three, Sky News, et al).
Sky Sports and Sky Movies never got pulled from Virgin's services since they ran on entirely different agreements (plus Sky and Virgin make far too much on those premium channels).
There was no "big sports event" since no sports channel got pulled. I think this was just before a 24 season start however.
When the networks stop relying on all these mindless Reality Shows "staring" all these narcissistic morons, I'll give a shit. I don't have Cablevision, but if Comcast dropped ABC, I wouldn't really care.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I know I'm just dreaming up science fiction here, but if only there were some way that ABC could send their signal directly through space to our TVs and bypass the cable companies completely, we could avoid this horrible situation. Maybe one day it will be possible...
In other news, according to a new entirely authoritative and conclusive scientific study (i.e. me), Cablevision subscribers have the most unrealistic sense of entitlement of any other pay-for-TV consumers in the entire US. They also apparently are all billionaire shareholders of Cablevision.
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I'm so glad I finally got rid of cable. If you leave near a major city where your local stations are located, take a look at getting an indoor HD antenna. (I'm using the Winegard SS-3000, kinda big but works great.)
Sirius Satellite Radio rolled out an A La Carte program in 2008 (under pressure from the government), and the number of subscribers that have chosen it is tiny.* Really really tiny. Mel Karmazin grits his teeth every time it's mentioned to him, the high cost it took to implement it and the tiny subscriber adoption.
So it appears many consumers really do like flipping through a zillion channels, for both radio and TV. I'd say it's a small Slashdot-style minority clamoring for A La Carte programming.
*I will say, Sirius does not exactly go out of its way to promote the A La Carte offering. But it does exist.
i dont think people care the much about losing abc.....
The millions of people who watch Lost and Grey's Anatomy would beg to differ. So would everyone who's planning to watch the Oscars tonight.
It may not be your cup of tea, but it's kind of stupid to say that people don't care about losing one of the major national broadcast networks.
Goo goo g'joob.
With a la carte TV , only what brings money in will get produced. Risky stuff or stuff with an audience too small to be rentable will not even get touched at all. At least with bundle you have a slight chance that the network takes a bit of risk for the off chance of a good pay. With a la carte this most probably disappear completely.
For what it's worth, the Wall Street Journal article says "ABC television stations" and mentions that the deal between Disney and Time Warner covers the cable stations as well as the broadcast network.
That's still not a clear-cut answer, but my guess would be that they were all pulled but ABC gets the lion's share of attention because the Oscars are tonight.
Goo goo g'joob.
This is the second incident in the past 4 months and I dont really give a crap whether its ABC's "fault" or not. The fact is, my service is provided through Cablevision and if they were thinking about how they service their customers, they wouldnt be pulling stations because they couldnt get a deal done. That's their problem as far as I'm concerned and just may switch to another provider because of this.
That being said, I'm not necessarily missing ABC right now (although the misses is a bit disappointed about not getting the Oscars tonight)
And you're crying about crybabies. Was that some attempt to prove your own point?
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
This whole thing is ridiculous. At face value and and in the deeper business meanings. Stupid, pure and simple stupid. It's 800lbs of stupid.
This should be avoided, and can be avoided if the last mile is not owned by the content provider. The last mile is community infrastructure that is paid for by subscribers, and should be owned by them. Yes, it seemed easier to outsource this laborious task to someone with a vested interest, but in the end it is not. All those Cablevision subscribers should be able to call customer support and have their content service provision switched while they are on the phone. They should be able to demand a la carte pricing too.
Instead we continue to allow the last mile community infrastructure to be owned and operated by those who fix the price of using the service. No, what I suggest is not the perfect answer, but it puts the ownership and decision making in the hands of the local community, not hot-headed corporate officers whose interest is bottom line dollars. When the infrastructure is owned by the community, and each 'service provider' is tied to the network, subscribers can choose who they want, not suffer until a new provider is in their neighborhood. As it is, we pay for multiple half assed last mile networks instead of paying for one damn good last mile network. We are charged stupid fees to use those half ass networks, and are at the mercy of 'service providers' marketing groups as to what bundles we have to purchase to watch the few channels we do like.
This community owned infrastructure would appear to give ABC an upper hand, but it does not. When I'm allowed to choose who I want to pay for service, and choose what channels I don't want to watch, the financing will do an amazing free market thing: kill off content that nobody wants to watch, lower the price of content that people do want to watch, and redirect monies to making content that is worth watching. ABC is going to have this coverage of the Oscars. Why do I have to pay for ABC crap content 24/7/365 to watch it? Why can't I use the pay per view options?
Television has been made an integral part of American society, and I think it's a sad reflection on that society that it is controlled by so few people, that so little choice is given to the same consumers that have to choose from 400+ options to buy a pair of running shoes. Personally, I think anti-trust laws were created with the intent of stopping this kind of thing. Screw ABC and screw Cablevision, and all their equals. Senator? Congresswoman? if you're listening, I'm holding YOU accountable.
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You say that, and yet Comcast (a different cable service provider) made an offer to buy the entirety of Disney a few years ago, including ESPN and ABC.
Don't always assume that just because a company is old it is always bigger than newer competitors - or customers.
I don't watch Hulu. Instead, I settled on PAYING a la carte via Netflix and iTunes. Personally, Netflix Instant-Cue is my preferred choice, but iTunes has reasonable pricing on the Daily Show and Colbert Report as a bundle and offers House, Better of Ted and a couple other shows that I can't get off of Netflix.
I refuse to watch Hulu because it is tethered to my computer, and even if I went through the effort of getting it on my TV, it's still a clunky web interface and not at all the simple TV-friendly interface I want when watching on my TV.
All in all, I pay about $100 a season, get all the shows I want and am quite happy.
This is down from about $120 a month I was forking over to Comcast.
And the joy of it all is I don't have to watch a single commercial.
ABC is going to have this coverage of the Oscars. Why do I have to pay for ABC crap content 24/7/365 to watch it?
Why do you have to pay ABC to watch the Oscars?
TV networks are becoming obsolete, just like RIAA/MPAA.
The death throes of the dinosaurs are violent and earth-shattering, for awhile, and then we move on with life, with a new business model.
Senator? Congresswoman? if you're listening, I'm holding YOU accountable.
You're "holding them accountable", they're sending the reelection campaign buckets of their customer's cash.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I have business class. There are no such restrictions.
In most areas its a MONOPOLY service, hence the intense scrutiny.
Good-bye
I'm no fan of Cablevision, but let's get the facts straight. $8 billion is their revenue. The actual amount they "pocketed" i.e. kept (the rest going to expenses) is their net income or profit, which was $285 million. This still is a pretty large amount, but the $40 million ABC wants represents a very large chunk of that income, paid to a single programming supplier. I'm in no position to judge whether or not this is fair, but it is natural that any company would look very carefully at such a large percent of their profit.
You are making a lot of assumptions about how the content gets delivered.
Historically, and still true for the majority of content it is not delivered on a "channel" specific to the subscriber.
Its essentially "broadcast" over the cable network, and subscribers tap into the broadcast.
There is no way an individual subscriber can change the service provider on this sort of network.
As systems move to digital delivery it becomes feasible, but requires much more investment than simply the physical cable/fiber network.
To do what you describe would require an "exchange" which would receive content from all supported providers, and a means ot switching incoming streams to individual subscribers.
I suspect that you would not like the price of this system.
All Sky1 shows usually was re-re-re-runs of Stargate anyway.
I was under the impression that sky1 showed a lot of big american shows before anyone else in the UK (or at least they used to).
Yeah they fill the rest of the time with repeats but frankly most channels do that.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register