I am watching a news report that Time Warner blocked out the ABC owned stations in various parts of the country from it’s cable subscribers. I guess the dispute runs over the Disney Channel.
If I were a cable subscriber with Time Warner, I would probably drop cable service and use that monthly extra to get high speed DSL access.
It boils down to (what else?) greed. However, the bad guys in this instance seem to be on the Time Warner side (Disclaimer: I’m a Slave of the Mouse, nothing I say should be construed as representing the official view of Disney, yada yada). In any case, the sticking point seems to be that Disney wants the Disney Channel to be a basic cable service. They figure they can make more money selling ads on that, and having Toon Disney as the pay channel. Time Warner wants to keep the Disney Channel as a pay service, not wanting to kill that cash cow off. So, Time Warner pulled the plug just before sweeps month to nudge my Evil Corporate Overlords closer to Time Warner’s view of things.
Both sides are being petty and venal, but right now Time Warner seems to be a teensy bit more petty and/or venal. The official line on both sides is “They MADE us do this!”, accompanied by the pointing of fingers and the gnashing of teeth. Today’s Wall Street Journal had a balanced article regarding this; both this morning’s internal e-mail from the head of ABC and Time Warner Cable’s website are pretty one-sided and useless.