I wasn’t the only one feeling the pain either: http://frytrix.blogspot.com/2005/07/i-miss-techtv.html

Well Happy New Year All!

————–NOT THOSE KINDS OF SPONGES !!! TWC is not Spongeworthy.

well whether we see eye to eye on this matter, I appreciate the informatin you post on this site!

Have A Great New Year!!!

[extra edit] apparently the Viacom crawl confused and worried a lot of people who were not on cable systems that would be potentially impacted by the outage. If so, I find that sort of despicable…

TWC is already losing customers to satelite and other providers, so they would have lost a lot of customers – and those customers said so when they started calling to voice their concern about the pending situation. Yes, you are right that Viacom would have taken the larger financial hit in the short term. But as I mentioned in my original post their loss would be temp as their customers would return via satelite, internet, or some other source within 30-45 days. Any customers TWC would have lost would have been permanent and that means not only losing customers for Viacoms channels but customers for their entire lineup of channels! So, in the long-term it would have been devastating to TWC!

Now you don’t have to agree with me about who had the leverage, but the fact that TWC caved would actually indicate that Viacom did in fact have the upper hand. You can still disagree, but it you would just be ignoring the facts.

As for using the crawls, that was Viacom using its leverage! Not sure why you would think it was dispicable? If TWC was quite certain how much of their customer base would walk if it lost Viacom’s channels, they simply used the customers to reinforce their leverage and force TWC’s hand. That is a display of using the leverage you have.

I don’t care for TWC or Viacom, so I wasn’t taking sides in the dispute. But I do have a background in business negotiations, and this was a simple one to figure out. If TWC could expect any lost customers to return once they reached an agreement with Viacom sometime after the New Year, then it would have been a different ballgame, but that was the key point in where the leverage was here.

That said, running the crawls on the bottom of shows, while perhaps despicable in the sense that even Comcast’s customer service phone lines probably were jammed with calls wondering the fate of SpongeBob, was genius.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/business/media/02cable.html

Now I cried when Viacom took control of tech tv, then they mereged it with the gaming net, I speak truthfully when I say that I have never watched G4 Tech TV since.

I mean I tried for old times sake, but could never sit down through an episode of any kind of tv show on that network. And my tv used to be on Tech TV 24/7! I don’t watch A&E anymore – I have watched every Horatio Hornblower movie.

I’m just glad that I was exposed to tv programming before Viacom got into the mix. Decades from now I am going to explain to my disbelieving grandchildren that MTV actually used to show music videos and was cool to watch, I used to wake up and place the tv on MTV and I used to watch it till I left the house.

I’m going to tell them that I never thought that VH1 would become my salvation – that used to be referred to as my grandparents music tv. And even their programming is getting more and more intolerable each season.

You are right and wrong for how things works in Canada. There are still packages deal.

I live in Montreal and I subscribe to the Videotron cable company, here how it works:I pay $13.99 a month for basic channels package which mean you get CBC both in french and english, CTV, TVA, TQS, Global and a bunch of other TV channels that I don’t watch. No I have no choice but to get those, I cannot choose which channels are part of the basic package.

Then for $8.00 a month I get the Sports combo of Golf channel, FOX Sports world, ESPN, NHL, SPEED, TNS, The Score.

Since I have HD TV I wanted Discover HD so I get to pay $3.99 a month for that.

This is where I get to ‘choose’ for $22.99 per month I can ‘choose’ 20 channels
BUT I have to have a certain ratio of Canadians and USA channels. I have 6 canadians channels, one channel from France the rest is USA channels including ABC, CBS NBC, A&E all in HD and CNN.

For $1.50 I can add a channel to the 20 channels BUT I still have to maintain the canadian vs usa channels ratio.

So, we get to choose a few channels(maybe it is different in other provinces with other cable providers.) but it isn’t the ‘I choose one channel I pay for that channel only’ I still have to pay for channels that I don’t want.

Earlier this year there was a polititian on TV that noted a trend in Canada where, If I could recall correctly, they get to choose which channels they want, instead of a package deal in America, they pay a fee for each individual channel they want or something like that. So they don’t get an excess of channels that they don’t want just to get the nets they do.

I think that if you are calling TWC to complain about this, also inject into the mix that this type of service would be more to your liking than paying for nets you don’t want, like MTV, over nets you do like, such as Nick.

I realize that TWC might loose some sterling cause of it, but Viacom would loose a lot of leverage if people start foregoing Nets they have come to hate like G4, MTV, VH1 – They are all crap as far as I am concerned. I knwo that some cable companies offer an adjusted rate to choose a few channels to make up your own package. But the individual pricing plan I believe is better ’cause there is no limit to the amount of channels you can have.

Anyway, TWC will cave in eventually, but it will need to take drastic measures soon because Viacom has the greater leverage in this dispute and they are not backing down. And a lot of TWC customers will surely switch to DTV because of this.

If those channels go dark I can assure you that TWC will recieve many e-mails & phone calls similar to this:

Time Warner Cable we diserve better.
We have been paying more for less.
Now that this is happening..i have a very good reason to drop you.
If you let those channels drop…i WILL drop you without a look back.
Bye-bye TWC….Hello DirecTv…or Dish Network…or other alternate service.

That is all I have to say on this matter.

Sorry if things got confusing at times. I tried my best..but i am only fourteen.

Anyhow, I’m just posting to wish everyone a happy and safe NYE and gentlemen, thanks for this insighful site. You guys do great work and I look forward to what you will bring to us all in ’09.

Wonder how the digital boxes are going to affect the cost of the “free” networks after come February.

Also, in a “fair” (based on ratings) a la carte model, you’d theoretically wind up paying for the broadcast networks which you currently get for “free” (assuming you wanted the broadcast networks). I personally have no problem whatsoever with this, I do not object to paying for Fox anymore than I’d object to paying for ESPN. But there would be strong opposition to paying for something that was previously perceived to be free.

The cable companies do what they want anyway. This didn’t affect me but it sure upset a lot of people in my area when Cox Cable bumped their religious shows to the Digital Tier after they had been on Expanded Basic for years. No one asks for input; they just expect you to go along.

Earlier in the year they just up and took away our HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime package as an additional cost choice on Expanded Basic. After much prompting to “upgrade” to digital they all just disappeared. At least with these channels they had to stop charging for them since they were extra. Cox Cable really really wanted us to bump up to digital. To begin with I would have had to subscribe to at least two movie tiers to get what I was already getting and I would be getting a bunch of movie offshoots I would never have time to watch.

All they succeeded in doing was lowering my bill thirty dollars. Now if I desperately want to see one of the movie channel’s signature shows I can always buy or rent them for the $360 a year I am saving. As for the movies, for the most part, we saw the ones we wanted to see in the theaters and were buying or renting accordingly anyway.

As I started this out, we don’t need 70 channels, we need the ten to twenty we would actually like to watch, with the option to add or delete.

So if the media companies are hurting, instead of ripping off their audience, perhaps they should to take a look at their marketing & programming departments. Bad economy or not, if an advertising campaign is working for an advertiser, then they are not going to be pulling it off the air.

Okay, getting of my soap box now

The first column is supposed to be each network’s total day rating; second column is what they charge per month for their channel; third column divides the second column by the first.

The HH Rtg for each network is a total day (6a-2a) rating from Jan 1 2008 to mid-August.

I simply divided the monthly subscriber fees, which are from a credible source that I can’t name, by the total day rating to come up with a “cost per tenth of a rating point”

In fairness to NFL Network and ESPN, this chart was produced in August so no NFL games are included. The NFL season will obviously help their ratings, although I would bet that in a year-end update of this chart they would still be the two least efficient channels on television.

The broadcast networks are not included because their sub fee is generally zero.

[comment edited by Seidman: I've cleaned up the table and posted it here, it's very interesting. Thanks, Mikey!]

Earlier this year I did an analysis of what each cable network charges for their product relative to the ratings they deliver. Comedy Central and Nickelodeon are two of the biggest bargains on cable. Spike is not far behind. There’s no question in my mind that Viacom has undervalued these properties.

Honestly, if I were running the negotiations for Viacom I’d turn this into a Dutch auction. Don’t want to agree to a 25-cent increase? No problem. Tomorrow our price is 30 cents, and next week it will be 40.

Well, a month later the channel indeed vanished (along with a couple others, but no new ones were added), while our bill stayed just as high. It’s since been raised to about $56 a month for just expanded basic, which is roughly 70 channels (no pay per view, premium channels, or any other extras). Charter is the only local cable company, and satellite is just not going to happen for us. So it’s either pony up and accept what they want to do, or get hardly any channels.

I’d love to see the math behind that claim. I have to believe they’re excluding broadcast networks, which if true would be disingenuous since that is part of what you pay for when you pay for cable.

I also think it’s clever for TWC to use the fact that the shows are available for free online against Viacom. That’s a fair point. A lot of content providers are alienating their most important partners by making shows available online where they make no money.

For that reason, I’m probably going to migrate to either Dish Network or DirecTV early next year.

But I truely sympathize wit you Jasbrit, I know what it is like to be stuck at home with a bunch of pre-teens – can’t imagine what the outcome would have been without the spongebob marathon – most likely the day would have ended up with me in a coffin.

Ohh Looky! The fun has just started for TWC – viacom is televising round the clock message on Nickelodeon, trying to frighten the kids.

You couldn’t pay me to go to satellite. Every time we have had it, it’s been a horrible disaster with the worst customer service on the planet.

And I think it’s hillarious that Viacom is painting themselves as poor little victims of big bad Time Warner in their press release about all this. Talking about how Time Warner needs to think about their customers, etc. Well, why can’t Viacom think about their customers as well.

So Viacom wants cable ad revenue, internet ad revenue, and wants increase fees that will be passed on to me? H*** no.

If a cable/satellite subscriber wants a Viacom channel so much, they can pay for it as an add on. Don’t pass the buck to every single subscriber.

No way, “Always Sunny in Philidelphia” is pretty much the greatest show ever created