ABC Pulls Channels From Cablevision 217
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.'"
Re:Poor ABC (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Can i get a discount now? (Score:1, Informative)
Call their customer's service number and ask for one. Whining about "probably not getting one" here isn't going to get you one, now is it?
Re:bundle fees have to end (Score:5, Informative)
Your cable bill is so high because consumers continue to allow cable companies to charge what they do. I dropped "cable" TV (I had DirecTV for a couple of years too) in 2008 and I have been much better off for it. We read more, we listen to more music, and we don't spend hours in front of the TV. I find it to be a win but I understand that entirely too many people do love their TV. Thankfully there are options:
1. OTA
This is what we have now. We watch some shows there and the quality is fine, when it works, and when the dog isn't walking in front of the antenna (I still don't understand how digital TV "upgrade" was a good compromise--at least when the signal didn't come in for the old way you could still see something or at least hear something).
2. Hulu/other streaming availability by network
We watch the majority of what we want to watch via Hulu. Yeah, I realize it's not the greatest option and not every show is on there but to be completely honest, you shouldn't be watching as much TV as you are anyway. Go outside or something ;)
3. Movies/Internet
We used to spend $60 a month on TV. Now we have upgraded cable Internet (I run a website out of my home and needed business class anyway) and we use the Internet a lot more (my masters program is all online) and we spend about $3 a month on Redbox. $57 extra dollars is worth it people.
---
As for the bitching about not being able to catch the Oscars... Go to a friend's house, go to a bar, get an antenna, or just wait till the next day. Believe me, you're probably not missing much.
Re:bundle fees have to end (Score:4, Informative)
OTA FTW (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
Re:Is the summary somewhat misleading, or TFA? (Score:3, Informative)
For what it's worth, the Wall Street Journal article [wsj.com] 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.
Re:To the people saying A La Carte is the answer (Score:1, Informative)
Sirrius/Radio: $13 per month
Cable: $80+ per month
BIG difference.
Re:Poor ABC (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Wow, this sucks. (Score:4, Informative)
We've pretty much obsoleted that model with the new digital broadcast. Now, instead of coverage areas that extend far beyond cities, the coverage pretty much ends in the suburbs.
The benefit is of course that there are no more snowy pictures - everything is either crystal clear or blank. However, as someone with a home in a rural area we went from five stations that could be picked up and a sixth that was rather iffy we now get one digital station. This is with a 10-foot mast on top of the house with a rotator. Of course a big VHF/UHF antenna is pretty much a waste anyway with the new signal frequencies.
Cable was the obvious choice and allowed moving from fringe-area DSL (384K) to cable Internet.
If you live in a city or close-in suburb OTA is still a reality, at least for now.
Re:bundle fees have to end (Score:5, Informative)
Here's some corrections to some factual errors/omissions. I am not even remotely speaking in an official capacity and I don't have a dog in this particular fight, but I do have more insight on the topic that the original poster.
1) Some channels cost, some are free/almost free, some pay. The problem is, you can see the total net cost used to be vaguely low/zero because it sort of balances out, kind of. But that's an unstable situation. A 10% increase on one channel, could result in a total net cost change of like 20%. So the claws really come out in the battle. In an internet era, how well do you think television shopping channels are doing? Hence some inbalance leading to chaos. Essentially pay TV is collapsing such that the only successful channels (sports and news) happen to be channels that historically were expensive.
2) Everything you see on commercial/mainstream media TV comes from about a half dozen corps. You can play games with percentage cutoffs vs number of providers, but "most TV comes from about 6 major corporations" is more or less correct. So there is no financial reason to have more or less than about a half dozen bundles. Bundle size/design is a purely marketing driven confuse-opoly situation, like the cellphone business or whatever. A bundle sends a certain bucket of cash to the Disney empire, and the cableco really doesn't care what fraction of that bucket disney earmarks for ABC vs disney channel vs whatever.
3) Its a zero sum game, to some extent. The providers already know that most subscribers only watch about 3 channels and budget their charges accordingly. On average this works pretty well, since almost everything on TV comes from only a couple multinational corps. So, you can pay the big media corps $75 for 300 channels of which you only watch 3, or you can pay $25/each to only get the three channels you watch. Either way the big media corp total revenue will be unchanged. You're better off with 297 channels available that you MIGHT watch in the future, plus people whom watch more than 3 channels would be really screwed with ala carte.
4) This ties in with #3. If a cableco caves into espn or abc, the problem is not that they've lost ONE battle with one channel. It means they've got to fight perhaps 50 smaller channels to make up the money somewhere else. Hence the claws come out. From the cableco perspective, the job isn't to win a battle with one channel, but not to start a war with numerous little channels. Worst case scenario, since some cablecos are owned partially or in part by content providers, is alliance type activity creating a TV WWI scenario where everyone sues everyone and no one wins or survives but the lawyers. Its a lot easier to fight one big channel to the death, than fifty little channels.
they have to provide content people want to watch
5) Ha Ha very funny dude. Actually, they have to sell eyeballs to advertisers. If all they had to do was provide highly desired content, we'd have about 500 channels of pr0n. But in psuedo-christian america, advertisers would get boycotted for advertising on pr0n. Hence, other than ppv, theres not much pr0n on tv. No one boycotts advertisers on violent shows, hence we're supersaturated with violent TV.
6) Some of it is a pure marketing PR stunt. As a rounded down percentage of the total country population, no one thinks of or watches ABC. But at least today, they got some PR. And theres no such thing as bad PR. Cableco costs go up because of the price of gas, insurance, etc, just like any other business, but this is a very public way of showing an attempt at limiting cost increases, even if its not the real cause of rate increases. Therefore, "Kabuki Theatre" time, and once enough PR interest is generated, we can go back to business as usual. I'd give it a couple days.
All Internet All the Time (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Cable Internet without cable TV? (Score:3, Informative)
I have business class. There are no such restrictions.
Re:OTA FTW (Score:4, Informative)
I'd agree, but leave off the part about 'HD'. An HD antenna is no different then an analog antenna that's been in use for many decades. People not knowing any better pay extra money because the box says HD or someone who doesn't know any better tells them they need and 'HD' antenna. They need a TV antenna. Period.
And... it's back on... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Poor ABC (Score:3, Informative)
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.