No Oscars Tonight For New Yorkers? Cablevision and Disney Yet To Strike Deal

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by Drew Grant | 11:19 am, March 7th, 2010

» 5 comments

By now you may have heard that Cablevision may be unable to show the Oscar broadcast, after a fight between the television provider and The Walt Disney Company fell through. Which might not be so big of a deal, except that um, Disney has WABC, the station that showcases the Academy Awards.

According to The New York Times:

It is possible that the companies will still reach a deal before the Academy Awards show at 8 p.m., although it is impossible to determine how likely that outcome is. The outright removal of a popular channel like ABC is rare, but not unprecedented.

If not, what are your alternatives? Well, like the Winter Olympics and NBC you could always find an Internet pirating site that will stream the Broadcast…but we can’t tell you how to get that. We don’t want to get in trouble. We’re just saying, it’s an option.

The fight is reminiscent of the one between Google and The Associated Press, which also threatened to pull content from the large aggregator recently. Then again, millions of people weren’t relying on Google to watch one of the biggest telecasts of the year tonight. Disney certainly has all of the bargaining leverage in this deal, but if it falls through, New Yorkers will have no love for the conglomerate.

abc, Cablevision, Disney, New York Oscars, Oscars

Cactus

You are correct that the blame for pulling the Oscars falls on ABC/Disney, as they (unlike Fox vs. Time Warner with Bowl games looming) pulled the plug and chose NOT to make a temporary truce while negotiations continued. But you’ll probably find that most people will blame Cablevision anyway, since they’re the ones who send the bill.

And the Food Network/HGTV battle is still fresh in mind…

These will only get uglier. I’ve seen first-hand how local TV station GMs are drooling at the thought of getting their “deserved” cable retrans dollars, repeating Nielsen-derived stats about how their stations get more viewers than “most cable channels combined” and such. The problem with this logic is that cable companies can sell local commercials on cable networks in “exchange” for those fees… there’s no such right on over-the-air broadcasts.

On the other hand, cable companies are gleefully taking subscription fees to supply free, over-the-air programming. Greed envy… it all reminds me of the 80s when pro athletes noticed how much profit team owners were making, and started extracting their fair share. In the end, we know who’ll get screwed.
Moderate

Cablevision should pay WABC the additional $40million and pass it on to the cable customers as the cost of doing business.
marcus.lewis

@Moderate That is absurd. WABC is free over-the-air. If WABC wants to be a Cable station then be a cable station. Consumers should not be forced to pay addition fees for stations we get free OTA and online. 10 years ago the average Cable bill was 35 dollars. Now the average cable bill if 75 dollars, with fees increasing 5% on average each year. Broadcast television is dying, and they are going to continue to press for higher and higher retrans fees—only escalating the % increase each year of our Cable bill. It is ridiculous to even suggest that Cablevision should pay up to WABC’s demands.
http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

One has to assume that the previous disputes (Fox v TWC; Sinclair v Mediacom, etc) resulted in an amicable solution, though the details haven’t been publicly disclosed. Of course Disney and Cablevision probably have a good idea of how they were resolved, but if they were to reach the same or a similar agreement, it’d be like codifying it and everybody is going to eventually want the same deal.
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