# No cbs on charter after 12-31-08



## tootal2 (Oct 14, 2005)

There wont be any cbs on charter st. louis after 12-31-8. Cbs wants 1 cent a day per customer from charter. Wont cbs lose more then that from ads on charter? 

I get cbs hd ota on my tivo hd


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## jeepguy_1980 (Mar 2, 2008)

tootal2 said:


> There wont be any cbs on charter st. louis after 12-31-8. Cbs wants 1 cent a day per customer from charter. Wont cbs lose more then that from ads on charter?
> 
> I get cbs hd ota on my tivo hd


When I was in Idaho, we lost Fox on TWC. It was gone for more than a year when I moved. I'm not sure if they ever got it back or not, but it was for the same reason.

The cable company argued that they were extending Fox's coverage, and thus the value of commercial time slots and the network itself. The Fox station argued that the cable viewers spent most of their time watching the network stations and for that reason the network stations added the most value to TWC's lineup. Yet, the networks weren't making any money off of the deal.

Both arguments are true, but everyone knows that in the end the customer will be paying the fee. OTA wasn't an option up there either. I do know that TWC lost a lot of customers in that area. But they did agree to reimburse customers for any Fox shows downloaded via iTunes.

Here is the resolution


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## Turtleboy (Mar 24, 2001)

The cable company and the network are playing chicken with each other.


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## Sapphire (Sep 10, 2002)

Turtleboy said:


> The cable company and the network are playing chicken with each other.


With ad revenue down, who can blame them?


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## timr_42 (Oct 14, 2001)

I hate Charter. If I lose CBS, that just might push me over the edge and loose cable. The thing that kinda keeps me is that I was planning on getting an HD Tivo and have to have cable.


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## pdonoghu (Mar 6, 2003)

timr_42 said:


> I hate Charter. If I lose CBS, that just might push me over the edge and loose cable. The thing that kinda keeps me is that I was planning on getting an HD Tivo and have to have cable.


If you can get over the air reception, with a Tivo HD you can connect an antenna (in addition to the cable), and get CBS and other locals via the antenna.


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## tootal2 (Oct 14, 2005)

timr_42 said:


> I hate Charter. If I lose CBS, that just might push me over the edge and loose cable. The thing that kinda keeps me is that I was planning on getting an HD Tivo and have to have cable.


Cbs in St. Louis works fine from the antenna in hd. i live in eureka and have no problems getting cbs hd with a antenna.

Also charter works fine with cable bards


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## jimisham (Nov 28, 2001)

$3.65 a year per subscriber adds up to a lot of money. The St. Louis Business Journal says Charter has 440,000 subscribers in St. Louis.


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## SpiritualPoet (Jan 14, 2007)

This same thing is happening in Texas. ABC television affiliate WFAA in Dallas will not be carried to 1300 customers Jan. 1 (WFAA wants 1 cent per household per month from Charter). Charter refuses to pay. The bill adjustment to customers? A mere .31 a month if Charter would simply comply. Charter is the Grinch who is stealing ABC programming from customers albeit the threat from WFAA. (A Belo broadcasting company).


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

> The bill adjustment to customers? A mere .31 a month if Charter would simply comply.


It won't stop at $.31 cents - once one local channel gets the fee then all of them will want it. Most local markets have 7-10 core local channels plus after they get 1 cent per day you know what happens next - 2 cents - 3 cents ....


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## martinp13 (Mar 19, 2001)

SpiritualPoet said:


> This same thing is happening in Texas. ABC television affiliate WFAA in Dallas will not be carried to 1300 customers Jan. 1 (WFAA wants 1 cent per household per month from Charter). Charter refuses to pay. The bill adjustment to customers? A mere .31 a month if Charter would simply comply. Charter is the Grinch who is stealing ABC programming from customers albeit the threat from WFAA. (A Belo broadcasting company).


My Mom is in this boat, and I don't know what I'm going to do for her. Her independent living place is Charter-only, and I don't want to have to go digital (she's 82 and understands the TiVo because she's had it for years). I'm hoping by the end of the year one of them will blink.


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## visionary (May 31, 2006)

Same thing happening here in Norfolk area, Charter is in Suffolk here so I am not in it, but the other stations are telling people to tune in their news instead, like the other station and ABC is going off!! That is way they word it.


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## lafos (Nov 8, 2004)

This seems to be a trend. Mediacom got into an issue with Sinclair, which handled Fox in my area in Iowa, losing the channel for a while. Then after I moved to a TWC area in Ohio, TWC and the NBC affiliate had a spat, causing the loss of NBC for a couple of months. I suspect that we'll see more of this, not less.


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## timr_42 (Oct 14, 2001)

KMOV.com is reporting that they have reached an aggreement with Charter.

I wonder who blinked?


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## gastrof (Oct 31, 2003)

What I don't understand is how this even happens. Isn't there still a "must carry" rule? How can you have a "must carry" rule the cable companies are bound by, and at the same time leave it up to the stations to decide if they'll let the cable company carry them?


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## Sapphire (Sep 10, 2002)

gastrof said:


> What I don't understand is how this even happens. Isn't there still a "must carry" rule? How can you have a "must carry" rule the cable companies are bound by, and at the same time leave it up to the stations to decide if they'll let the cable company carry them?


Under FCC rules, a station can either force the cable company to "must carry" and expect no compensation, or don't force "must carry" and instead offer retransmission consent, usually for a fee.

The net result is that the bigger stations (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX affiliates and O&Os) can charge money for their signals because pretty much everyone wants to carry the big four, whereas the smaller, usually independent stations can force the cable companies to carry their signals on cable when otherwise they wouldn't be carried.


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## SpiritualPoet (Jan 14, 2007)

I recall the must carry rule. I think it applies unless the station mandates a fee for carrying the broadcast in which case the must carry rule isn't enforced.


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## tootal2 (Oct 14, 2005)

timr_42 said:


> KMOV.com is reporting that they have reached an aggreement with Charter.
> 
> I wonder who blinked?


Will kmov be in hd on charter now? Was that just for the non hd channel?


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## donnoh (Mar 7, 2008)

My opinion is if the local station wants money from the cable company screw em. See how many people watch them OTA, they seal their own fate by doing that.


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## magnus (Nov 12, 2004)

I wonder what would happen if Charter brought in the ABC affiliate from Houston for example. Could they do that? Or is there a law that would prevent that?



SpiritualPoet said:


> This same thing is happening in Texas. ABC television affiliate WFAA in Dallas will not be carried to 1300 customers Jan. 1 (WFAA wants 1 cent per household per month from Charter). Charter refuses to pay. The bill adjustment to customers? A mere .31 a month if Charter would simply comply. Charter is the Grinch who is stealing ABC programming from customers albeit the threat from WFAA. (A Belo broadcasting company).


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## gastrof (Oct 31, 2003)

I'm pretty sure that if a station has the rights to certain programming in a given market, they can tell the cable company to black out any other station that's offering the same programming, even if in a different time slot.

On OTA we had at one time three ABC affiliates. One was a little too far away for us to get by antenna, but it was technically still in our market, and our cable company carried it.

All of a sudden the cable company stopped running the feeds of the two furthest away whenever they ran ABC network programming. Either they'd put up a black screen with lettering that told us to tune to the nearer affiliate, or would switch to a duplicate of the nearest affiliate, so that channel was being shown on three different cable channels.

Got to be a pain, especially when the cable company got the timing wrong, and the other two WEREN'T running network programming, but rather local programming. We still couldn't see it, even tho' it wasn't something our nearest ABC station was running. 

Eventually the other two stations were dropped from our cable lineup entirely. 

Same story with a local independent, which ran old TV shows that some cable sources (for example, TBS) also ran. During such programs the cable channel (TBS or others) would be blacked out, because the local station didn't want shows they had local rights to being shown by another station on our cable system.

I'm guessing fhat if the Dallas ABC station won't allow the cable company to carry them without getting paid for it, they're sure not going to allow the cable company to import the Houston ABC affiliate.


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## martinp13 (Mar 19, 2001)

tootal2 said:


> Will kmov be in hd on charter now? Was that just for the non hd channel?


Analog and HD. It looks like it was all the Belo stations in this squabble: Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, St Louis, and Seattle (and probly others not mentioned). When KMOV was settled I checked the Dallas WFAA site, and they had the same "tentative agreement reached" article posted.


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## classicsat (Feb 18, 2004)

gastrof said:


> I'm pretty sure that if a station has the rights to certain programming in a given market, they can tell the cable company to black out any other station that's offering the same programming, even if in a different time slot.
> 
> On OTA we had at one time three ABC affiliates. One was a little too far away for us to get by antenna, but it was technically still in our market, and our cable company carried it.
> 
> ...


That is the norm on Canadian cable and satellite systems, where "competing" US channels are switched for the Canadian one, if they are both carrying the same program.
And yes, botching it up is also a problem, because it is largely automated.



> Same story with a local independent, which ran old TV shows that some cable sources (for example, TBS) also ran. During such programs the cable channel (TBS or others) would be blacked out, because the local station didn't want shows they had local rights to being shown by another station on our cable system.


That is called Syndex (Syndicated Exclusivity). There are no such rules in Canada.


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## SpiritualPoet (Jan 14, 2007)

Charter Communications has settled with WFAA-TV in Dallas to carry programming to the 1300 customers. In addition, TXCN will also be carried. (Texas news channel also owned by Belo Broadcasting). There will be no interruption in service past Dec. 31.


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

donnoh said:


> My opinion is if the local station wants money from the cable company screw em. See how many people watch them OTA, they seal their own fate by doing that.


it's more complex than that. neither side is innocent.

cable charges their customers 30,60,90, 120 bucks a month. Yet the most watched channels are all the big 4 broadcast networks and they get none of that. ESPN charges something like 2 buck a sub. How many people watch ESPN compared to the big 4? It's a fraction generally. So broadcast tv could argue that they should get multiples of ESPN's monthly take.

I wonder if cable argues with ESPN that they give ESPN a bigger footprint for their ads so they shouldn't pay ESPN anyting?

In the end if cable refuses to pay- many people will go to satellite.
(who i think has generally been paying the fees all along due to the way the industry developed).

they all want our money and dont want to share.

The small markets are interesting. in the big O&O (owned and operated markets)- disney, nbc, cbs, and fox can all bundle their broadcast stuff with the "important" cable chanells. So maybe Time Warner in NYC doesn't pay disney for WABC but they pay a pile for espn and disney already and get WABC as a throw in. Becasue of that the price for ESPN and Disney is inflated becasue WABC isn't broke out. So the dink cable system in the middle of the country pays too much for espn. But the company that owns the dink ABC affiliate in the middle of the country gets no money from cable at all. So in the end it's almost like the dink cable systems and dink stations that aren't O&O get hosed.

the whole system is a little odd but not sure how to improve on it. Must carry is good for the dink stations, but I see the point of the giants that they should get compensation since that's what gets watched most BY FAR. Cable on the other hand is forced to spend valuble bandwidth on the dink who demands must carry, and winds up paying for something that you or I can stick up an antenna and get for free.


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

martinp13 said:


> Analog and HD. It looks like it was all the Belo stations in this squabble: Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, St Louis, and Seattle (and probly others not mentioned). When KMOV was settled I checked the Dallas WFAA site, and they had the same "tentative agreement reached" article posted.


curious- analog and HD?

is the agreement to carry one analog and one HD- or is it for one SD and one HD. Not a big difference but i'm curious how the deals are structured now that the analog cutoff is here.


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## bubba1972 (Mar 28, 2005)

It looks like Charter in St. Louis has an HD feed on 784, although no guide data is available.


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

i saw on the news last night that time warner is having a pissing match with viacom over 19 channels including nick and mtv...


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## That Don Guy (Mar 13, 2003)

gastrof said:


> I'm pretty sure that if a station has the rights to certain programming in a given market, they can tell the cable company to black out any other station that's offering the same programming, even if in a different time slot.
> 
> On OTA we had at one time three ABC affiliates. One was a little too far away for us to get by antenna, but it was technically still in our market, and our cable company carried it.
> 
> All of a sudden the cable company stopped running the feeds of the two furthest away whenever they ran ABC network programming. Either they'd put up a black screen with lettering that told us to tune to the nearer affiliate, or would switch to a duplicate of the nearest affiliate, so that channel was being shown on three different cable channels.


This has been a rule since the late 1980s, I think. The cable service where I used to live once had 3 ABC stations, 2 NBC stations, and 2 Fox stations, but a combination of this rule and the addition of more and more non-local cable stations (and no room to show all of them) resulted in all but the locals being removed.



Turtleboy said:


> The cable company and the network are playing chicken with each other.


Don't expect the network to blink. I remember about 20 years ago when a cable company north of San Francisco got into a fight with ABC over adding ESPN2 to its system (never mind that they had no room to add a channel and the other channels all had contracts), and ABC removed the San Francisco affilitate for almost a year, although they did allow two shows to be aired - the Academy Awards, and a Monday Night Football game that the 49ers played.

-- Don


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## ZeoTiVo (Jan 2, 2004)

MichaelK said:


> i saw on the news last night that time warner is having a pissing match with viacom over 19 channels including nick and mtv...


they resolved it. No word on who got the most piss


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## tootal2 (Oct 14, 2005)

kmov hd on 784 on charter cable cards works now. But there is no guide data to go with it yet.


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