Time Warner/Viacom Rift Healed, Pending Details 75
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."
It's 2009. Happy new year... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's 2009. Happy new year... (Score:5, Informative)
(Ubuntu user here, sorry for the tired old joke
Re:My bill better not go up even higher now. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Subject (Score:1, Informative)
See, thats actually the problem
Viacom, being the assholes they are, assume that all of TWCs profits from Television were coming from Viacoms contract. so they wanted more of that. (which was under wrong assumption)
Normally, cable providers don't make much of a profit from the networks, so if Viacom wanted a 'raise' then that would be passed to the end consumers, which in the end would have been well into the millions. and Viacom wanted the extra per subscriber, not a % based increase from last years contract, but a raiser per TWC sub. So, if TWC takes on another million subs, then Viacom gets even more.
Viacom was really extorting TWC in this situation.
I mainly find it funny that Viacoms public statement gives the impression that TWC makes a lot of profit from Viacom alone.
but as I said, contracted network agreements, like with Viacom, the cable provider makes little profit, if any (in many cases). the profits that a cable provider makes in television is really limited to networks that the cable company has substantial stake in. for example with TWC, any Time Warner company.
Re:Subject (Score:5, Informative)
From the mouth of the TWC CEO:
Link #1 [longreply.com] "Viacom is trying to extort another $39 million annually"
Link #2 [longreply.com] 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 [twitpic.com].
They blocked everyone (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:My bill better not go up even higher now. (Score:2, Informative)
Your definition of net neutrality scares me (Score:4, Informative)
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...