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."
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Viacom had to cave eventually. They can't win this battle too easily. I'm sure TWC made a few concessions, but they win this one easily I'd guess.
But really, this is not insignificant. We'll see much more of this in the coming years.
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I think this is interesting in you really can't tell who has who by the balls.
My first reaction is Viacom has the upper hand. Nobody subscribes to cable TV to watch the carrier signal. No content means no customers, and Viacom was holding enough of the big channels that cable would be useless to most people without them. But then, with cable companies holding mono
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I was watching TV last night (1/1/09 around 8pm) and Viacom was STILL running 30 second ads saying how Time Warner removed 19 channels from your lineup. Along with the Time Warner phone number. So it looks like Viacom was prepared to remove the channels and wasn't bargaining in good faith.
A deal was made, yet Viacom already had the ads lined up and still ran them, even tho the channels were still on the air.
Earlier this year it was Lin TV and TimeWarner (CBS in Buffalo), now Viacom and TimeWarner. I just wo
It's 2009. Happy new year... (Score:2, Informative)
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It will be when it's duped. In the meantime, maybe they got hit with the "Zune 2009 is a leap year so stop working after December 31st 2008" bug?
Re:It's 2009. Happy new year... (Score:5, Informative)
(Ubuntu user here, sorry for the tired old joke
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(Ubuntu user here, sorry for the tired old joke :P )
No, a tired old joke would be making a comment on Duke Nukem Forever's release date. Then again, when something has been in development that long, everything about it (jokes, developers, the earth on a geologic timescale) gets pretty old.
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2008 may have indeed been a more accurate description. Personally, I think it should be renamed:
2008 - Year of the RIAA.
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Just Wondering (Score:3, Interesting)
How much do you think Viacom will be paying to distribute its commercials to Time-Warner subscribers?
Torrents, Usenet Binaries, Rapidshare, mIRC.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I have Time Warner Digital Cable, have had it for years, as Time Warner has a true monopoly on nearly all of the areas in Central and Upstate New York that I've lived in. My NYC apartment as well has Time Warner Digital Cable as well as getting a phone line and internet package was a cheap deal at the time and still is.
But have I turned on my cable boxes in the last two years? Not really. Everything I watch is downloaded or streamed on my PC. Instead of watching Major League Baseball, I use MLB's official MLB.TV video and radio streaming service. Episodes of LOST, South Park, Robot Chicken? Torrents usually. Some of them pirated, some I pay extra for. Either way it's still the same programming but different media.
Time Warner could literally blackout 99.9% of the channels (with Digital Cable I get over 500 channels of pure crap) and it wouldn't affect my TV viewing habits because I've made a complete transition to viewing media on my PC (or using VGA out to my HDTV) rather than from a cable box.
Even with HBO On-Demand that I pay for I still prefer to download episodes of shows or movies from the internet and just run them off my Laptop or my PS3's hard drive and onto my HDTV.
When is cable going to switch to à la carte programming and not forcing hundreds of wasted bandwidth and channels on the consumer?
What sense does it make to offer me 1000 channels, that's 1000 x 24 hours of programming a day...who has the time to watch that? Melchior? The Nu?
Give me à la carte or give me death. I'll pay for my cable as 'stealing' HBO without paying for it is not cool in my book, but the box remains unplugged so far in 2009.
Re:Torrents, Usenet Binaries, Rapidshare, mIRC.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Ala Cart Cable isn't going to be much better, the channel owners will claim they need some large sum of money for ala cart purchases because of the lost revenue stream or "self promotion" or whatever their bundles currently offer.
Taking greed into account from both the Cable providers and the channels owners, I suspect your ends up with something like $5 a channel with a minimum of 5 channels or something like that when going ala cart (if it was possible). I think too many people are thinking it would be so
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You could just rent the DVDs for most of the stuff on HBO, and there's a free (audio) podcast of Bill Maher's show. Seems to me you could probably cut down to a lower video package, if you're really not watching (even 'indirectly') those channels.
My bill better not go up even higher now. (Score:2)
Personally, I wish it did go off the air. TWC was talking refunds if the channels went dark. although I doubt they would refund the money, it would have been nice since I wouldn't miss any of those channels.
If it goes up because of this agreement all of a sudden however, I'm switching to Dish. For once, I was actually hoping a CableCo would stand up to unnecessary rate hikes. At least Dish Network let the channels go dark for a few days to put the pressure on.
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.
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I don't know if their contract allows this, but the minute those banners showed up on their programming, TWC should have pulled those channels and replaced them with a nice graphic telling Customers that Viacom expects you to pay more and tell them to stop. Complete with a nice 1-800 number going to viacom HQ.
And as for market loss... I don't know if it would be that much of a loss. No one other than Dish Network went longer than 2 days, and I doubt they lost a ton of customers over it. And if you factor in
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This isn't the first time Time Warner has played hard ball and forced a group of channels off the air in the last 12 months. In Central Ohio they've done this twice now, well almost twice - the Viacom thing was averted at the last minute but the first instance was earlier in the year with the CW I think it was and their affiliated channels. I didn't care much to lose the channels, but my mother-in-law sure did and raised a big stink about it.
Then there was the highly publicized Big-10/Time Warner spat too -
That's nice. (Score:2)
A poster on yesterday's thread [slashdot.org] claiming to be the "director of digital communications at Time Warner Cable", stated that lost channels would be refunded to some degree on bills.
I take it that this latest agreement will also be, um, represented in the upcoming bills also?
It's the jobs of both companies to raise the shareholder value - and the best agreement in that scenario would be to agree to take more from customers.
The original suggestion of using the Internet to access programming is starting to look be
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you should check out what leo laporte is doing with http://live.twit.tv/ [live.twit.tv] he says that he gets as many viewers for his flagship show as tech tv ever got on cable. Sure the network only runs for like 30 hours a week, but the staff is TINY. This is the wave of the future.
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i think it's time to find a way to stop making everything beholden to the shareholders' wishes. whether it's allowing a company to exist for only a certain time or something else, somehow corporations have to be reined in.
Commercial revenue down thanks to DVR (Score:4, Insightful)
Now its time for an alternative source of revenue. Unfortunately we are the ones who are going to pay for it as Time Warner and others have shareholders to meet and need to raise the price.
Thank god I do not watch TV that much anymore thanks to the internet. Maybe that is a good thing as some tier packages are approaching $100 and its ridiculous.
People unfortunately will pay big bucks for entertaining as witnessed from cell phones and TV packages. So why not charge more?
Subject (Score:5, 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.
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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 contrac
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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].
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Well, I think the more important point is that this represents the definitive end of net neutrality: Nobody was *actually* shut off because of the ultimate outcome but Viacom insinuated that unless TWC, the ISP, was willing to pay more they would no longer have access to the free online content not because of territory restrictions but because they weren't getting a big enough score from subscriber revenues. The waters are muddied only by the fact that they appeared to be pursuing revenue for their TV chann
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.
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...
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Good point. It is not the ISP doing the blocking, but the content provider selectively blocking to negotiate prices. I suppose that is different in principle.
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Nice post, and less than 4 hours after the OP admitted his mistake. Oh, and that bit about completely ignoring the person you're talking about while they're standing right next to (on top of in this case) you, pure brilliance. Raw arrogance, ignoring the admitted correction, and generalizing about why slashdot sucks.
Beautiful troll, and written well enough so that most people won't even notice. Bravo.
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The fact that DigitAl56K replied to the same parent that I did, and even conceeded there was room for a difference in opinion (I do not consider his reply to be an admittance of mistake or correction of his original post due to the wording, and nor should it be either of those things as it is his opinion in both cases) does not mean that I cannot also mak
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I'm not grandstanding, and I have no reason to. Your attempt at looking highbrow through a lengthy and well-worded post fails me. Please, instead of trying to look sophisticated yet snarky, explain to me how your post differs from a troll. What, exactly, opinion of yours am I differing on?
Less arrogant expansion of simple concepts and more information please.
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Nice post, and less than 4 hours after the OP admitted his mistake.
Since he was speaking of the general case, and you are speaking of the specific - when will you admit your mistake?
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I don't understand your question.
Seriously, the fact that the poster was speaking in the general is covered in my post, I made no error.
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Why not? If ISPs don't get to extort money from websites, then websites don't get to extort money from ISPs.
As far as the DOS prevention tools problem goes, net neutrality has always had similar issues, the proponents just don't want to listen to anything thats wrong with their simple solution.
A low blow (Score:3, Interesting)
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This is standards operating procedure for Viacom. They've had these spats with DISH Network too...at least twice I can remember in the past few years. Every time I hear about one of these disputes, it's always Viacom on one side of it. What does that that tell you about them?
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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.
...and extort a shitload out of rival cable operators for the privilege of keeping its channels. [wikipedia.org]
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For its part, TWC has agreed to rape its customers with even less lube to make up the difference.
It's not rape if the customers pay for it, and continue to pay for it.
I always chuckle when someone says "XYZ company is raping/screwing/(other sexual act) its customers!" It's not like someone's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to buy TV service!
Need more alternative channels (Score:2, Insightful)
I never watch MTV - no more music videos, instead FAKED SCRIPTED(reality?) shows and contrived pc interracial multicultural dating shows.
It would be nice if there were alacarte.
Or even new shows NOT owned by one of the few production companies out there. Where is the variety?
In the end cabletv will die out with real fiber to home internet access which is affordable.
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The Spongebob Channel? (Score:1)
Why hasn't Viacom produced a 24 hour Spongebob channel? At any given moment, there is a very high probability that Spongebob is on one of the Nick channels. Why not give people some consistency and let them find Spongebob at his very own channel?
That's what DVD box sets are for (Score:2)
Why hasn't Viacom produced a 24 hour Spongebob channel?
It has. You can get a lifetime sub for under $25 per season [amazon.com].
icravetv.com (Score:4, Insightful)
TWC should only have to charge people for the pipe not the content. We watch commercials to pay for the content. I understand paying for premium channels but paying for ad-laden channels that fill most of cable is ridiculous.
BTW I seem to remember that one of the networks had icravetv.com shutdown prior to the super bowl because it would diminish the value of the event. I don't know how letting everyone who wants to watch commercials hurts you but then again that's my whole point.
Why TWC pays... (Score:1)
There's a simple reason TWC pays for these channels. They plaster their own commercials all over them. Cable companies are in the advertising business. Call them up and you can get your ads on any channel you like, even Viacom channels, and only in your local area.
So, given that TWC gets to put the ads on the channels, why shouldn't TWC pay for the channels?
Viacom was about to block Road Runner IPs (Score:2)
thers very few channels you cant watch legily over the internet.
Unless your IP address is assigned to an ISP that also owns a cable TV network that no longer carries the channel. Road Runner customers were about to run into this. Switching ISPs would involve moving house closer to the DSLAM.
TV is stupid. (Score:2)
Yeah, I'll still watch the Simpsons, Futurama, and Family Guy -- go figure, the guy saying TV is stupid is watching questionable shows -- but, jesus, I've had "Dude, Where's My Car?" on as background noise since it started. I'm watching the gag reel at the end right now, and it's the first time I've actually paid attention to it. No shit, this is what's on TV. Check my local listings if you don't belie
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If my TV fell off the "entertainment center" tomorrow, I wouldn't feel too bad about it.
I would feel bad about it, but only to the extent that I also use my TV as a monitor for my game consoles and my gaming PC.
Easy (Score:2)
In 9 years with TWC my bill was never the same 2 months in a row. They always wanted a few extra pennies.
I don't have that problem with DirectTv and get twice the channels for a $5.00 increase.
Viacom and Complaints (Score:4, Interesting)
My wife decided to call Viacom and complain about their demanded 22-36% rate increase. The minute the woman heard her say "I'm a Time Warn...", my wife was switched to a recorded message blaming Time Warner for the whole mess and giving a Time Warner number to call to complain to. In other words, Viacom didn't want to hear any complaints and was trying to direct the ire of subscribers back to Time Warner.
Time Warner employees, however, saw my wife complaining on Twitter and gave her information on who to contact in Viacom. They also told her that it was unlikely that they would answer though as they had taken off until Monday morning. In fact, when Noggin and the rest didn't go black at 12:01am, we wondered if they were all just out of the office and forgot to leave someone there to shut the feed off.
Instead, it looks like Viacom asked for 22-36% and "settled for" 15%.
I seem to remember... (Score:1)
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I have no love for TWC, I dropped them a few months ago over continuing issues with their cablecard support. I'm not saying that TWC is at fault in this case, but this is the third specific time I can think of in the last few years where TWC has threatened to or has cut off access to programming over a dispute with a content provider. It seems like each time a content provider is twisting TWC's arm to charge more for content already provided, or to provide additional channels at additional cost to the cus
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I don't understand this but now that Obama is in.. (Score:2)
Now that we will soon have President Spend-Thrift Obama in power, Viacom and Time Warner will ultimately have to play fair or be swallowed up in one governmental agency or another for it. Since Viacom was seeking an increase in revenue stream from these particular shows in question, this generally means that Mr. Obama will simply make them pay more taxes. He did say during his campaign that he would be increasing taxes on everyone! So as a result, all you American (socialist) citizens will either get to see