As expected, Fox & Time Warner Cable reached an agreement late on New Year's Eve to avoid Fox cable networks from being pulled from TWC systems across the country. However, in New York, the Food Network, cable home to Rachael Ray, among others, was removed from Cablevision's roster in a similar dispute. Cablevision owner James Dolan, who also owns Madison Square Garden, the NY Rangers, & NY Knicks, is more of a hardcase when it comes to negotiations of this nature. In time, a deal will be reached to put Food Network back on Cablevision, but this is the sort of thing we will have to expect at the end of the year every year. As I noted before, I'd not be surprised if TWC has the same thing happen at the end of 2010, but this time with NBC-Universal, Disney (which has previously had problems with TWC), or even Cablevision, which also owns AMC (formerly American Movie Classics).
Maybe the Government should put this on its priority list ahead of President Obama's dream of a college football playoff......
Yeah, everyone wants more every year than they had the previous year. And their "more" becomes our "less". So what do we, the consumers, get "more" of in the end? More lousy tv programming? More commericials? More bad acting and worse writing? More reasons to turn the tv off and less reason to pay more to Time Warner is pretty much it.
ReplyDeleteWell, Crhyme, if they found a way for smaller companies to buy the networks away from conglomerates, we might get somewhere. They're not training a lot of people in Hollywood to actually develop something sensible. They are under the mistaken notion that we as consumers have the dreaded "sound byte mentality". No, not all of us do.
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