ECHO/Dish Network station ban Portland OR

[HornBuckler]

I Was Watching Comedy Central Today And Saw A Message Crawler On The Bottom Of The Screen That Said That BET, MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, And Nickelodeon As Well As Nick At Nite And TV Land Stations Are Going To Be Removed From Their Customers Channel Pool. Anyone Else See That? And Is There Some Kind Of Political Reason Behind This?

Seems Fishy As Hell To Me.

[flowomo]

1. contract issues apparently...

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. - Thousands of Dish Network customers in 15 major cities waited to find out whether they would be able to watch March Madness, soap operas and other television programming as a programming deadline approached in a dispute between EchoStar and Viacom.

A court order allowing the satellite television company to continue carrying about 20 channels owned by CBS parent Viacom Inc. during the contract dispute was set to expire at midnight PST. Neither company would comment on the negotiations Monday and an EchoStar spokesman did not return a call late Monday about any changes that might occur right after the deadline

[supernova]

2. DISH is in negotiations

with Viacom right now.

There were a couple of threads about it already.

[HornBuckler]

3. Any Links?

I Am Trying To Find The Reason Behind This, The Channels Mentioned Seem Like The Most Watched Channels In The 18-34 Voter Pool.

[supernova]

6. Here's a Lounge thread

from this morning. Contains news and link to another threada bout this topic.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=863916

[otohara]

4. Echo Star In Battle w/ Viacom

it's getting ugly, both sides won't budge - if you go to your local CBS Station, you will get this message:

Attention Dish Network/Echostar subscribers: K--- deeply regrets any inconvenience to our viewers resulting from Dish Network's threats to drop KCNC. Dish Network just raised rates for many subscribers by three dollars per month, yet they are refusing to pay Viacom barely 6 cents more per month so you can continue to get all of the CBS programs, KCNC's local news, weather and sports, and all of the Viacom cable channels including MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. We are continuing to try to negotiate a fair resolution to this completely unnecessary situation, in the meantime, we remind our viewers that our signal remains available for free over the air, as well as by subscription from DirecTV and your local cable operator. Thank you. Click here for more information.


Deadline is 1AM EST for them to come to a deal or all Viacom stations on Dish will go black. I don't expect anything to come of this - the CEO of Dish is a gamblin man and isn't backing down from the bully tactics Viacom is throwing their way. But they will come to some sort of agreement. Viacom is famous for doing this - they are ASSHOLES as we all know: ie- canceling The Reagans, won't run MoveOn.org -

[fujiyama]

5. I saw it earlier as well...

According to this blogger:

http://eastatlanta.blogspot.com/

Caught in the crossfire

Our living room has become a battleground.

We're caught in the crossfire of a pissing match between Dish Network and Viacom. I hadn't really known about this war until a few days ago, when semi-subliminal messages began appearing on my screen when I was watching VH1, MTV or Comedy Central.

In near-invisible type, a crawl comes across the screen every now and again which reads something like "Dish Network customers - if you want to keep the following channels: MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon - you must call Dish Network and ask them to keep these channels."
___________________________________SNIP_____________________________
This, I suppose, was Dish Network striking back at Viacom for inserting the original message into their Dish Network feeds.

So I news Googled dish network viacom and got the straight poop. Turns out Viacom is trying to force Dish Network to carry each and every one of its channels or none at all.