Denied Nickelodeon, DirecTV’s Youngest Clients Find Substitutes

[SoCalDem]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/business/media/dispute-with-directv-aids-viacoms-rivals-in-childrens-programming.html


By BRIAN STELTER
Published: July 18, 2012

Threats of television programming blackouts have become begrudgingly accepted by adults who know what these financial fights are all about. But children accustomed to their daily dose of SpongeBob SquarePants are proving to be a bit more restless. For the second week, Nickelodeon and its two smaller siblings Nick Jr. and Nicktoons, owned by Viacom, have disappeared from DirecTV’s lineup, affecting would-be viewers across the country. The two companies have not been able to agree on the amount of money that Viacom should receive from DirecTV for a bundle of its channels, including Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central. For the Disney Channel, Cartoon Network, the Hub and Sprout, it is the equivalent of a baby boom after a hurricane or a snowstorm. After all, while adults may have 500 channels at home, children only have a handful to choose from.

“The first two days were rough on my toddler,” Mary Pedone Howard wrote on the Facebook wall for Viacom, where hundreds have posted angry rants against the company (and against DirecTV). Now, though, when it is TV time, she said her daughter asks for the Disney Channel instead. “Leave it to a 3-year-old to show mom that adaptation is a great thing,” she wrote. It will take months to determine whether there are long-term effects to this “forced sampling,” as another irritated parent, Brian Chisholm, called it on Facebook.

First, the blackout has to end, and on Wednesday, there was no new sign of light. On Wednesday afternoon Derek Chang, an executive vice president of DirecTV, said that “we’re exchanging ideas” with Viacom in “multiple calls every day.” But Denise Denson, his counterpart at Viacom, said in a telephone interview a few minutes later that the two companies were at an impasse. Her daily calls with Mr. Chang, she said, are short and insubstantial. “We don’t see an end in sight to the blackout,” she said. Blackouts of cable channels are rare, and when they do happen, they tend to be resolved within hours, not days.

“I’ve never seen a situation like this. The outage has lasted so long and it’s so broad,” said Sandy Wax, the president of Sprout, a channel for children backed by NBCUniversal and the Public Broadcasting Service. DirecTV made Sprout, which was already available to most of its subscribers, available to all after the blackout started. “We don’t relish this happening to anyone,” Ms. Wax said in an interview. But “the idea that more customers are going to be able to sample us,” she admitted, “that’s a positive for us.”

She added, “Hopefully they’ll come back after all the dust settles.”

snip

[Cleita]

1. I realized that of all the Viacom channels, the only shows I care about are

The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, which I can watch online the next day. So Viacom you are losing in this.

[PoliticAverse]

2. I guess turning off the TV isn't a possibility... n/t