DirecTV users lose Comedy Central, MTV in fee dispute
By Mark Glover, Sacramento Bee
Sacramento-area DirecTV customers missing programs this week on Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central and more than a dozen other Viacom cable channels can at least take solace in the fact that they’re not alone.
Nationwide, 20 million viewers are in the same boat.
Channels owned by Viacom went black on Wednesday, the byproduct of yet another dispute with DirecTV over so-called carriage fees – money paid for the right to retransmit content.
Both sides are blaming each other amid failed talks for a new carriage contract. The existing contract recently expired.
Denise Denson, Viacom’s executive vice president of content distribution and marketing, said “the last proposal DirecTV had made was lower than anyone else pays in the industry, and a deal we said we would not do out of fairness to other distributors.
“DirecTV also refused to engage with us on any issues related to the deal beyond the rate increase. We are ready to talk at any time.”
I can’t wait for my DirecTV refund since services have been reduced to the consumer.
Tahoeadvocate, I hate to say it, but good luck with that refund!
Sounds like DirecTV customers are in the same boat as Dish Network ones were last year when Dish dropped CBS, meaning Reno’s KTVN was off the air for nearly two months. No CBS programming at all. California Dish customers are forced to get Nevada, not California, coverage. Paraticularly bad with exclusively Nevada news, nothing for California. And then we got none at all via CBS. And forget about a refund. I argued for one at numerous “management” levels without success.
Who watches comedy central about half of what is on my direct tv could go away and i would not know it
No great loss. In fact, no loss at all.
Hopefully the day is not far off when consumers will be given a choice exactly which channels they want to pay for and view, a la carte, instead of being forced to pay for tiers of channels containing unwanted and unwatched selections whose inclusion is simply to unnecessarily pad the bill.
Some might even actually pay more to have Comedy Central and others dropped. It is no surprise that Cable TV companies rank near the top of America’s most hated corporations.
If you call them, they’ll give you either $10 off your monthly bill for 12 months OR one of the movie channels (Starz, HBO, Showtime) for free for 6 months.