Cash of the Titans.

[captainsblog]

Sunday was return-to-normal day- at least until 9 p.m. Eastern.

I'd reclaimed my tablet from the church in Syracuse, joined them for a beautiful and inclusive service, got to see Em on the way home, and got back in mid-afternoon to a welcoming throng of fur.  I fed everyone, we ate ribs out on the patio, we listened to good music, and I planned to end my day with my usual relaxing Sunday night hour with a serial killer.

That, alas, is where the normal ended.

In place of Dexter on Time Warner channel 221 was a foreboding notice:



Great, I thought. Here we go again.

----

These broadcaster-transmitter disputes seem to pop up every couple of months. Sabres games were pulled from Time Warner for months two seasons ago while corporate titans at TWC and MSG fought it out. Our local CBS over-air affiliate went dark, taking most Bills games with it, a year or two before that. This was widely regarded as a good thing, and when nobody missed it, the parties finally settled. 

In this one? The piss-match is mainly over the network's "O-and-O" stations, like WCBS in New York City, which CBS itself owns and operates (unlike most of the country where "affiliates"- independently owned stations- pass along the programming).  Since 1992, the owners of local stations have had the right to demand "retransmission fees" from cable and dish systems for carrying their free over-the-airwave content on their systems.  The cost rarely goes beyond a buck a month per subscriber, but the current demand seeks to double that in major O-and-O markets like NYC.  Time Warner hasn't given all that much pushback to the demand- after all, we're the ones who pay it- but they've sought to up the ante by getting more redistribution rights for the buck- expanding on-demand rebroadcasts of shows, for instance- to fend off competition from the likes of Netflix.

Longtime Times television analyst Bill Carter (whose piece on the pissing sources most of the facts in this entry) reports that the Eye is Not Amused by that counterproposal:

More recently the two sides have suggested that the fee issue is either close to being resolved or that the differences are not insurmountable. But there is deep disagreement over concessions Time Warner Cable wants from CBS related to programming — mostly its catalog of older shows, which CBS sells to digital distributors like Netflix and Amazon. Time Warner Cable wants access to those programs on terms it says are fair and reasonable; CBS says that the company is essentially seeking something free, and that these deals have nothing to do with the retransmission negotiation anyway.

Read that back again. An owner of television stations, which demands that cable companies pay for something that they put out over the public airwaves for free, is rejecting an expansion of what is included in the payment for the free stuff because then cable companies (and you and I) would be getting something for free.

Yeah. It's enough to make you want to set up a kill room.

----

Of course, Showtime- a national premium channel having nothing to do with CBS's O-and-O stations, ALSO has nothing to do with the retransmission negotiation, either. But that's not stopping them from including them in their leverage, playing chicken with that whole plate of programming and keeping it away from the entire country of TWC subscribers because of a breakdown in talks over a handful of O-and-O's.

Making this time a little different is that, this time, Time Warner pulled the plug.  Carter's piece explained why they did- and why, to a near certainty, CBS would have pulled it in about a month. Yes, it's all about the goddam football:

But several media analysts suggested the standoff might be protracted, with predictions ranging from about 10 days to as long as six weeks. The later date is associated with the start of the N.F.L. season, a package of programming that everyone involved agrees cannot be denied to subscribers.

Indeed, timing seems to be the dominant factor driving the dispute. CBS has continued to insist that it would make its programs available to the cable company throughout the negotiations and that the cable company acted now to remove them from its service because Time Warner Cable would lose leverage as the football season got closer — a point the cable executives do not dispute. They acknowledge they need to push the issue now.

They're pushing, all right- but it's pushing their customers away.  And not just to competitors like dishes and FIOS. In many of the O-and-O markets where over-air coverage has been pulled, there's a new and dangerous kid in town from the perspectives of both CBS and Time Warner. It's called Aereo, and it gets around content provider demands for retransmission fees by using teeny tiny leetle antennas, in big boxes of farms of them, to capture the over-air signals and transfer them, one to one, to actual set tops.  Courts so far have held these arrangements to be legal, and there's big money behind the concept, which could put both cable companies and local stations out of the money if this dispute encourages customers to use it.

Plus, in case you haven't heard, there's this Series of Tubes out there, and that's subject to the same games of chicken going on at the tv-set level. CBS has cut my access to its online versions of its broadcast shows, just because I'm a Time Warner Internet customer. But they can't cut my access to others' sources, and I've now seen this week's Dexter, and almost certainly will the final six, without skipping a beat. 

Oh, and did my cable company lower my bill when they cut the only premium channel I subscribe to? Of course not. They substituted Starz, which I find about as useful as a tit on a boar. So I've now taken 221 off the bill and the box- and, given that my one guilty-pleasure series will likely be over before football season begins in earnest and these non-Tennesee Titans finally settle their differences? I quite probably will never go back.

Comments

[thediva-laments.livejournal.com]

This makes me miss TV less and less. I only wish I knew someone would could provide me with a login to an HBO account so I could see Game of Thrones season 3, then I'd be all set.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm.... Suppose I could substitute Home Box for the SHO- and at least that will never go dark since Time Warner owns that channel.

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

I would dearly love to be able to chop all sports from my cable. We don't care about a single pro sport. The one thing we'd like to see is the Artic Race of Norway, but America just barely televises the Tour de France, and certainly has no interest in showing the bike race that began today.

[greenquotebook.livejournal.com]

Do you subscribe to Amazon Prime? That's how we watch programs broadcast on channels we don't get with our sub-premium DirecTV package. We do pay extra for the CenterIce package though. :)