NAB ad places blame for carriage wars with Time Warner, DirecTV, Dish Network

You can't argue with these facts from the Nat'l Assn. of Broadcasters. So, what is it about Time Warner Cable and the two satellite companies that makes them dig their heels in so hard? I dunno, maybe they'll respond.

Matthew Polka

So far the only person responding is Matthew Polka from the lobby group the American Cable Association. He spoke to MediaPost's Wayne Friedman:

Matthew Polka, president/CEO of the American Cable Association, stated: “The point that no one should miss is that CBS' massive blackout of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks showed that the retransmission consent market is broken and outdated rules governing these negotiations need to be updated to reflect current market conditions.”

He added: “If CBS can leave millions of pay-TV viewers in the dark for 32 days, no one can say with a straight face that the marketplace is working well for consumers.” 

There's a problem with that statement. CBS didn't leave their viewers in the dark, Time Warner pulled CBS' channels, a violation of their contract with subscribers in my opinion, as a negotiating ploy. 

 

Matthew Polka is a liar. Doesn't surprise me, he IS a lobbyist.

Here's the BIG FUCK YOU from Time Warner Cable

From their site called TWC Conversations, though this is nothing like a conversation. Although it's a Q & A format they both ask the questions and provide the answers. Nice, huh?

Q:  Will I be getting a credit for the blackout of CBS?

We already provided a preview of premium programming from Starz Kids & Family, , and a free movie on demand or an Amazon gift card, and free antennas to those that chose to take them. We also provided Tennis Channel to all digital customers during the US Open. All of that has a significant retail value and we won’t be providing any additional compensation.

Remember that CBS is carried as part of a programming package, and we typically do not adjust what customers pay for changes to the lineup—whether channels are added or removed.

They used me as a pawn in their negotiation.
They failed to deliver contracted services.
I already had Starz.
I don't care about tennis.
I got no gift card.

This is what qualifies as doing business in America in 2013. Time Warner Cable has managed to set the bar even lower than ever before.

The CBS/Showtime blackout is over, so why am I still VERY angry?

It's all over. Sometimes last night after 6 pm. all those Showtime channels on the grid repopulated along with the Smithsonian Channel. Of course we never lost the CBS Sports Network, poor little unpopular channel. It's been the whipping boy of the whole debacle.

I am still pissed off. Pissed off at Time Warner Cable. Pissed off because they chose to not deliver content I had already paid for (you pay your cable bill for the upcoming month's service) as a negotiating tactic in a dispute that should not have involved me at all.

I was not on Time Warner's team or CBS' team, I was on MY team. They were not on my team, despite their constant claims to be "working for me." The point of it all in Time Warner's mind was that they were protecting me from higher prices.

Bullshit.

So we're back to Ray Donovan and the final season of Dexter and all the Gigolos reruns you can stuff in your craw from the On Demand menu. One thing this new agreement does do for consumers is provide Time Warner subscribers to Showtime Anytime, their IPTV catchup service. Not yet, just checked, but apparently soon.

I will not be happy until the pay TV services begin to sell access to their catchup services to non-cable subscribers. Starz doesn't have one yet but I'm sure it's in the pipeline.

Ultimately what the disruption did for me was it let me know I could survive without cable. I purposely spent many days with just offerings from Netflix and Hulu and I was very happily enrobed in all kinds of great programming from previously unseen British sketch comedy from Robert Webb and David Mitchell to the first season of Bob's Burgers with which I needed to catch up to movies like Iron Sky (Nazis who have been settled on the dark side of the moon since WWII are found) and Safety Not Guaranteed (Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass get ready to travel through time).

If I didn't have a senior in my home I would be cutting the cord right now. However, he has a thing for turning on the History Channel and watching hours of their Vegas-set pawn and restoration shows. Still gonna try, gonna lay out the costs and the benefits for him and see if I can talk him into it. The difference in price is enormous! These two services and a digital antenna can get you through and quite famously, actually.

Something to think about. Huh?

CARRIAGE WAR: CBS: "It's not me, it's you" Time Warner Cable: "Huh?" CBS: "I get along fine with others"

CBS has reached a retransmission agreement, and in very short order.

But not with Time Warner Cable. It's with Verizon for it's FIOS customers. The agreement covers changes in their fee structure and Verizon will include more content from the forgotten by many and not so popular CBS Sports Network on their mobile network.

Los Angeles Times:

"This important deal was reached swiftly and amicably in just a few days after our conversations began," CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves said in an email to CBS employees Thursday that appeared to be a not-so-subtle dig at Time Warner Cable. Moonves went on to say that CBS had offered Time Warner Cable almost exactly the same deal that Verizon accepted.

"In it, we achieve fair value for our over-the-air rights, while preserving our streaming rights as well," Moonves said.

Ow! That hurts, doesn't it Glenn Britt, Chairman of TWC? Apparently it's you who can't play well with others. I know that Glenn is worried that his company is slowly devolving into just a pipeline service for data, but that's the way the market is heading and he'd better wrap his head around that soon and make changes or he'll be standing where long distance carriers stood as his cable company offered nationwide calling for one low low price.

Time Warner Cable, looking this morning like a little bitch! Painted into a corner. Set their own trap.

Angry Time Warner Cable subscribers on Twitter for August 18

The Twitter bird looks pretty mad! I think there's trouble in paradise for Time Warner Cable. If this goes past the beginning of football season all hell is gonna break loose.

Here's a selection of Tweet heat from the interwebs:

@MegTowe @TWC @CBS I was just wondering the same thing? Time for FioS?
— arianash (@arianash) August 18, 2013

@TWC is to blame NOT @cbs for your blocked channels. You pay the cable company your hard earned dollars. #CANCELTWC and move on to @Uverse
— Joe The Music Man (@IKNOWMUSIC_2012) August 18, 2013

@tvdotcom @TimAtTVDotCom Here in Kansas City, the @CBS @TWC mess is just a win for @googlefiber
— Ben Knight (@camulus) August 18, 2013

Saw the trailer for Season 3 of #Homeland just now. Pumped! Just hope @CBS and @TWC work out their dumb argument so I can actually watch it!
— Constant Complainer (@ComplaintMan) August 18, 2013

What nice gesture to fuck over LA during a great #dodgers season...@TWC & @cbs. Disconnecting my cable ASAP.
— Vizzy (@ShaunVizzy) August 18, 2013

CBS Sports Network remains on Time Warner Cable. Did they forget?

It's the only CBS cable television property left on my Time Warner Cable connected TV. Why? My theory is that Time Warner forgot they carry the channel.

Why? Maybe it's their programming mix, which obviously includes Major League Lacrosse (image above). Yes, there's professional lacrosse. No, I don't watch it. They wear masks, you can't see their faces like in Aussie Rules Football, which also has sleeveless uniform shirts. WIN!

Also today on CBS Sports Net? Bull riding, arena football and motorcycle racing.

Blah.

Couldn't have left Showtime, huh?

Today's Time Warner/CBS dispute news links: Frustration, piracy, predictions, rebates & ratings

As you can imagine, I'm not the only one writing about this. Here's a taste of what some media are focusing on in this battle.

Fern Siegel is a deputy editor at MediaPost and you can hear her frustration:

Assuming you, like me, have been following the exploits of America’s favorite serial killer — or avenging angel, as Dexter sees himself — for years, the frustration is acute! Added diss: The day after I lost the ability to watch the first of the three final episodes, TWC raised my cable price.

Oh, the humanity.

And it did so, while running a statement on TV that read, in part, it was committed to “reasonable rates.”

This is what is known as irony.

After all, when the shouting is over, whatever the resolution, TWC customers will be stuck with the bill, which unlike the stock market, is on a perennial upswing.

Wired Magazine reports that the big winner so far in this dispute is piracy:

Viewers of new CBS hit Under the Dome didn’t seem to be moved by either side’s argument, looking elsewhere for ways in which to keep up with the latest episodes of the series. According to the Torrent Freak blog, “In New York City, one of the largest affected markets, the relative piracy rate more than doubled from 1.3 percent of all U.S. downloads last week to 3 percent for the episode that aired after the blackout.”

In fact, Under the Dome piracy spiked in each of the areas affected by the TWC blackout, jumping 34 percent from the previous week’s episode. This localized increase coincided with a slight drop for the episode in terms of overall downloads for the episode internationally.

NYC mayoral hopeful & City Council Speaker Quinn on TWC/CBS dispute

The war plays out on Twitter, too.

At @TWC & @CBS hearing urging both parties to negotiate & not hold NYers hostage to their contract disputes anymore pic.twitter.com/HVQncdmsxw
— Christine C. Quinn (@ChrisCQuinn) August 8, 2013

So you say you want to sue Time Warner Cable. You're not alone!

So? So do a lot of other people. Check out the results of this Los Angeles Times poll that asked what end users would like to do in reference to the dispute.

You can still vote in that poll, click this link. It's on the same page as Jon Healey's most recent story on the retransmission dispute (carriage war) between CBS Inc. and Time Warner Cable, from Friday's paper. I know, I think they should have a story every day, too. I'd rather see the Times to original reporting on this than recap So You Think You Can Dance, which they do.

(A newspaper. In a major city. Recaps the dancing show on Fox and publishes it in the paper, often. As if it were news. SMH.)

There are some people following through, people uniquely qualified to do so. In Milwaukee there's a retransmission dispute between Time Warner and their NBC affiliate which is owned by the Journal Broadcast Group. They missed a Green Bay Packers preseason game this past weekend.

The guys bringing the suit, those uniquely qualified guys? Lead plaintiff is Milwaukee attorney Paul Scoptur, and I'm guessing he's not paying himself for his work on this case. That suit might have legs, if only because of an angry lawyer. I never thought I'd be applauding an angry lawyer, but GO PAUL SCOPTUR!!!

His mention in a Friday Hollywood Reporter story at this link.

I'll follow this and keep you in the loop.

Can't get CBS because you're a Time Warner customer? But you CAN!!!

I've been seeing tweets all day from people complaining how they missed their PGA golf because they can't get CBS.

Grrrrrr ...

Broadcast TV is free, boys and girls, and with the exception of the Pittsburgh market you should be pretty able to pick up the CBS network signal with your digital TV even without a digital antenna. I can in San Diego and I'm about 20 miles north of downtown.

(The Pittsburgh market covers a large swath of western PA and a lot of communities east of the city have trouble getting a signal because of the terrain.. Some of the earliest cable TV systems were started in the area, in fact.)

Digital antennas aren't very expensive, a good one can be found for under $40 at Radio Shack and a lot of online outlets. I found Mohu, a company that makes both indoor and outdoor HDTV digital antenna. One of their indoor antenna is pictured above. It's just a flat thing that looks like a mudflap that you either buy a holder for or mount on a wall.

There are others, too. You hook it up to your TV and then go through your TV's channel finding routine and you got all your broadcast channels in HD if you want and with their secondary signal channels as well, like Me-TV (playing classic TV reruns) for some CBS stations.

If you're a Consumer Reports subscriber you can click over to their site and see a review of some digital antenna. At this link.

Get one. Stop missing your shows.

Seth Rogen makes America proud as celebrity harrasser protester of Time Warner Cable

UPDATE: Not a harasser but a protester. Still finding the right language for all this, apologies. Seth is a TWC Customer and a fellow protester. 

Thank you Seth for your service to the cause. Readers, here's Seth's Twitter feed, scroll to see his Time Warner Cable protest tweets. Follow him, encourage him, he has more followers than we do.

Tweets by @Sethrogen

Carriage wars: Will anyone win this Time Warner v. CBS thing?

Sam Ro in Business Insider:

"While this appears to be a lose-lose in the near-term, UBS analyst John Janedis thinks it's worse for Time Warner than it is for CBS.

"'Our view continues to be that consumers have more loyalty to the content rather than the company which is responsible for distribution and with contracts often running 5+ years, CBS can’t afford to take below market value given the inability to renegotiate terms,' said Janedis in a research note today.

Indeed, cable subscribers pay Time Warner, not CBS, for the content.  So, it's understandable why consumers would direct their frustrations to the cable provider."

Of course there's another reason why Time Warner should lose support from the marketplace, it is them who have pulled the CBS Inc. content off their systems, CBS was more than happy to keep the stations on during negotiation.

You know who doesn't win? Us. We lose.

Are you missing PGA Championship this morning? Did Time Warner Cable pull you golf coverage?

Missing your golf this morning because you live in a city where Time Warner Cable has pulled the CBS-owned CBS station that's airing the PGA Championships? If you are ...

...YOU ARE A MORON.

Sorry, I had to say it. You needed the slap.

Folks, your TV probably gets your CBS station. You don't even have to unplug from the cable. Your TV's manual will give you all the details on doing such. If you're in one of these markets (Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Detroit) find your manual and perform the more-than-likely automatic process that will find your CBS station.

Don't be a moron. Broadcast television is free. It's always free. Despite what's going on here which is a fight over retransmission fees. There's a workaround. Do it.

Though I must say, I don't understand the fascination. The ball and the hole are so small, and it's so boring. 

CBS & Time Warner Cable carriage war fuels cut-the-cord commentary

This new version of the "blue screen of death" above is really pissing me off. How about you?

Lots of stuff in the press today about cord cutting, the business of cable television and the future.

Frank Rose at The New Yorker website:

"... the only way for cable companies to satisfy their customers is to embrace their dumb-pipeness. They need to focus on their broadband business, not their television business—the thing they’re capable of doing well, as opposed to the thing they keep messing up."

 And then later at his own blog Deep Media:

"They (the cable companies) really, really suck at providing it (television). For years, marketing experts have been telling them they need to build their brands by offering more and more services. The problem is, they can't manage the services they've got, and they probably never will."

At Broadcast Engineering, there are handy charts and some stats on customer loss for cable and satellite companies. At this link. And finally, from a while back but worth the read is Netflix' plan to replace broadcast television. They're doing pretty well so far.

Time Warner Cable, don't screw with my TV. I WILL cut you.

Sometimes good things come of bad things.

It's day five of CBS Inc. vs. Time Warner Cable. Haven't had any of the gazillion Showtime channels, lost the Smithsonian Channel too, and I didn't even realize CBS served them up.

(Now I understand why Tom Cavanaugh did all that stuff for them, he's probably working off his Love Monkey contract. Yes, I know it doesn't work like that. Yes, I would have liked to see where that show went. No, I don't know what Tom is doing now.)

Missed Ray Donovan on Saturday. Not that I'm current, I have three episodes on the DVR yet to watch. The DVR's a bit of an issue right now, also, it seems to be stopping recording stuff after a time and you have to reboot the thing to fix it. Gotta watch those (and all of Downton Abbey series three) before I turn it in for new hardware, if I do at all, Time Warner Cable you bastards.

You see, the thing is ... CBS is more than happy to have Time Warner continue to feed the channels to their subscribers, but Time Warner has pulled them in an effort to affect negotiation. Apparently CBS Inc. loses $400,000 a day in fees from us because of this. Of course CBS lost probably 20 times that just airing a Rob Schneider sitcom a few times so I don't know how that's a punishment. $400K a day for a corporation the size of CBS is a dime clinking around your washing machine.

So yeah, I'm pissed at my cable company. And I'm doing something about it. And I'm activating this blog again.

I already have a Roku 2, but I also got a Google Chromecast this week. Roku didn't support YouTube and a guy's gotta see his very well shot amateur videos from the Comic-Con panels so that wasn't gonna do. Chromecast is fine, but for a guy like me who doesn't opt for a smartphone in his life (I'm a much better person for it, not judging you) it means operating the thing from my laptop, which means carrying that around the house.

The loser here is Samsung. I bought a Samsung Smart Blu-Ray player hoping it would handle all this but the YouTube interface fails constantly and they decided NOT to update the Smart Blu-Ray for HBOGo, just the higher priced TVs. Boooo!

I know ... White people problems.

So, for the next few weeks I'll be trying out this cord cutting thing without actually cutting yet. Trial run. Test. And if you want you can follow along. I'll update on Twitter too (@JoeWatchesTV) and of course I'll be complaining to every one of my Facebook friends along the way.

Don't screw with my TV. I will cut you.