My local CompUSA in Hauppauge, Long Island NY has had a Software to go machine for several years. First it was in the aisles, with a rep hanging around it to explain how to use it.
Then they moved it behind customer service about 18 months to 2 years ago and its run by the CompUSA employees there. This may be new in the West coast, but its been around for no less than 3 years.
EchoStar recently raised its rates to subscribers by as much as $3.00 a month. But they refuse to pay MTVN a less than 6 cent increase per month they were asking for ALL of their channels including CBS and BET. When Americans watch TV, they spend over 20% of their time with the affected networks -- yet their fees are less than 5% of what EchoStar gets from its average customer. Consider that distributors pay over $2.00 a month to ESPN for that ONE service.
MTV Networks spends over $1 billion on programming each year. The increases in programming costs go way above the increases in license fees that we ask from distributors.
Echostar had actually already agreed on a deal with Viacom in January, but renegged on it and decided to file a lawsuit instead of coming up with a new agrement.
As for all of those talking about how good of a company is, and how you wanted the small company to win out...
They've been found liable for copyright infringement and for stealing CBS's signal for five years.
They have a long history of filing frivolous lawsuits, and spent much of their time in court the last several months
They tried to get a court to issue an injunction against MTVN - and they lost.
Echostar has a history of being rather Truant on paying their bills to content providers, Viacom lists them as being one of their "latest" payers.
EchoStar is NOT a "mom and pop" operator . In reality they are huge and powerful. With almost 9 million customers, they are the 4th biggest distribution company in the U.S.
During all of this, Ecostar wasn't taking calls from people complainig about the outage, or if they were you had to go through a long winding automated system to get a live human. Their messages consisted mainly of "Call CBS".
Viacom set up a special line and had hundred of employees whose jobs have nothing to do with custmer service manning phones to talk to customers about the issue. Many of these people stayed well into the evenings, in some cases past Midnight on the east coast to handle calls which flooded their switchboard from nearly all 50 states.
Just a point, no argument really, but MTV and clear channel have nothing to do with each other.
Infinity and MTV share the corporate Parent, clear channel is a different animal all together.
And I would also point out that placebo, Coldplay and Radiohead all get a fair amount of play on MTV and MTV 2. DJ shadow has even had little newbriefs on him when they do "documentaries" about the music industry and underground Djs and whatnot.
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I thought I was the only one to realize this Why is this news? The ad campaign for the Farscape Miniseries is more recent than this one...
My local CompUSA in Hauppauge, Long Island NY has had a Software to go machine for several years. First it was in the aisles, with a rep hanging around it to explain how to use it.
Then they moved it behind customer service about 18 months to 2 years ago and its run by the CompUSA employees there. This may be new in the West coast, but its been around for no less than 3 years.
As per Tom Freston, CEO of MTV Networks:
EchoStar recently raised its rates to subscribers by as much as $3.00 a month. But they refuse to pay MTVN a less than 6 cent increase per month they were asking for ALL of their channels including CBS and BET. When Americans watch TV, they spend over 20% of their time with the affected networks -- yet their fees are less than 5% of what EchoStar gets from its average customer. Consider that distributors pay over $2.00 a month to ESPN for that ONE service.
MTV Networks spends over $1 billion on programming each year. The increases in programming costs go way above the increases in license fees that we ask from distributors.
Echostar had actually already agreed on a deal with Viacom in January, but renegged on it and decided to file a lawsuit instead of coming up with a new agrement.
As for all of those talking about how good of a company is, and how you wanted the small company to win out...
They've been found liable for copyright infringement and for stealing CBS's signal for five years.
They have a long history of filing frivolous lawsuits, and spent much of their time in court the last several months
They tried to get a court to issue an injunction against MTVN - and they lost.
Echostar has a history of being rather Truant on paying their bills to content providers, Viacom lists them as being one of their "latest" payers.
EchoStar is NOT a "mom and pop" operator . In reality they are huge and powerful. With almost 9 million customers, they are the 4th biggest distribution company in the U.S.
During all of this, Ecostar wasn't taking calls from people complainig about the outage, or if they were you had to go through a long winding automated system to get a live human. Their messages consisted mainly of "Call CBS".
Viacom set up a special line and had hundred of employees whose jobs have nothing to do with custmer service manning phones to talk to customers about the issue. Many of these people stayed well into the evenings, in some cases past Midnight on the east coast to handle calls which flooded their switchboard from nearly all 50 states.
Just a point, no argument really, but MTV and clear channel have nothing to do with each other.
Infinity and MTV share the corporate Parent, clear channel is a different animal all together.
And I would also point out that placebo, Coldplay and Radiohead all get a fair amount of play on MTV and MTV 2. DJ shadow has even had little newbriefs on him when they do "documentaries" about the music industry and underground Djs and whatnot.