THIS IS IT FOLKS! TIME WARNER TO CUT OUT 19 VIACOM CHANNELS...

[link to www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com]


So now this fight between the two Big Media giants will hurt cable viewers. At 12:01 AM on January 1st, just after the ball drops in Time Square, Time Warner Cable's 13.3 million subscribers will lose 19 Viacom channels -- Comedy Central; CMT: Pure Country; Logo; Palladia; MTV; MTV 2; MTV Hits; MTV Jams; MTV Tr3s; Nickelodeon; Noggin; Nick 2; Nicktoons; Spike; The N; TV Land; Vh1; Vh1 Classic; Vh1 Soul. The howling starts here, especially by parents home for the holidays with children who won't have access to their favorite shows like SpongeBob Squarepants and Dora The Explorer, and tweens/teens wanting to see new episodes of those new unreality Reality TV series The City and Bromance, and twentysomethings and older who get their news from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart or The Colbert Report.

This affects all U.S. Time Warner cable subscribers including those in New York and Los Angeles. Alex Dudley, a vice president at Time Warner Cable, the nation's second-largest cable operator, is telling reporters that the dispute with Viacom "is that they have asked for an exorbitant increase in their carriage fees and their network ratings are sagging." However, Nickelodeon is 2008’s No. 1 basic cable network, drawing the largest audience in its history. MTV, on the other hand, has seen ratings slide. Time Warner Cable claims it's "trying to hold the line on fees for our customer" -- but it's really worried that if Viacom gets its raises, then every cable programmer will want them. TWC claims Viacom has asked for fee increases of between 22% and 36% per channel, but Sumner Redstone's company maintains the increases would cost less than $.25 a month for the package of channels per subscriber who spend a fifth of total TV time watching Viacom shows but its fees make up less than 2.5% of the Time Warner cable bill. (Sports channels are paid the biggest cable premium). But Time Warner Cable also is complaining that Viacom's popular shows are rerun on Web sites where Viacom collects advertising revenue that it does not share with Time Warner. On the other hand, Viacom has staked much of its revenue-growth prospects on squeezing higher carriage rates out of its cable and satellite affiliates despite an ad slowdown and weaker ratings.

Such negotiation battles between