Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Viacom & Echostar Squabble

This is topic Viacom & Echostar Squabble in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 03-09-2004, 08:29 AM:

Dish Network customers now have blank channels where Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, CBS network related channels and more are supposed to be.

This is all due to an increasingly bitter contract "negotiation" that became even more bitter and deadlocked in recent weeks. In the wee hours of this morning, all the Viacom channels were removed from the Echostar satellites.

I've been a Dish Network customer since 1999, and was the first guy on my block to have a two line Dish 500 dish. But I'm not going to pay upwards of $50 a month for service that does not include channels like Comedy Central and VH1.

Dish Network's website is currently clogged with traffic and virtually unreachable. Their phone lines are hopelessly busy with lots of angry calls. Viacom's website has no e-mail contact information.

What I would like to tell them both is they need to work things out very quickly and in such a manner that it doesn't jack up my monthly satellite bill. It has been years since my last pay raise, so I really will not be made to have any sympathy for them getting one either.

With times being difficult, I'm always looking at new ways to cut costs. With Echostar and Viacom behaving like a couple greedy, insolent bastards, I'm now looking at saving myself around $45 a month by cutting both of those morons out of my wallet.
[fu]

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 03-09-2004, 08:56 AM:

In a possibly related story... Bell ExpressVu lost sound for a few minutes on nearly all of their channels "during the wee hours" this morning. Echostar runs the ExpressVu service for Bell.

quote:
With times being difficult, I'm always looking at new ways to cut costs.

Got a scalpel and a soldering iron? [evil]

Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 03-09-2004, 10:15 AM:

Dish & Viacom are the devil!

My dad installed dish network because they carry BYU TV. I hate it! The video quality blows, the picture garbles and drops out on cloudy days (yes, the dish is pointed correctly) and it doesn't offer two way communication like cable does (needed for on-demand content which will become more popular a few years down the road).

Does Viacom need more money? Hell no. They own some of the most watched networks, a major studio, the worlds largest video rental chain, and a tv distribution company. They are unnecisarily PRICE GOUGING consumers. By the way, I doubt that there asking for more money from DirecTV, which they unrelentlessly hawk in their Blockbuster stores.

Oh, and the "wigga-wigga Viacom!" logo bugs me.

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 03-09-2004, 10:23 AM:

Out of curiosity, what's your signal strength percentage. I've got a friend with a Dish Network system that gets 96% signal up here with a 20" dish.

I've got 100% signal strength on my ExpressVu dish. Even through some nasty blizzards it has yet to drop out. I've only lost the signal when the dish got blown down the street.

Maybe the Dish Network coverage isn't great where you are since you can't really go any further south west in the continental US, or maybe your azimuth is a little (or even a lot) off.

Posted by Chris Erwin (Member # 176) on 03-09-2004, 10:24 AM:

I don't have the dish anymore (digital cable) but I notice that VH1,MTV,etc. has been running a crawl at the bottom stating that these channels may no longer be available on Dish Network and to call Dish Network and ask for them to keep their programming.

Posted by Jeff Taylor (Member # 443) on 03-09-2004, 11:00 AM:

Sounds like a replay of the hassle cable folks went through last year when George Steinbrenner invented the YES network and began gouging for Yankee games while insisting that it be a basic service. Cablevision (MSG network) subscribers took it on the chin for six months before that was resolved. I've got Direct TV and am delighted with it, but now that Hughes has sold out to Murdoch we'll probably be in the same boat. It's all part and parcel of mixing programming and distribution, and we're going to see more rather than less of it in the future.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 03-09-2004, 11:16 AM:

quote:
I notice that VH1,MTV,etc. has been running a crawl at the bottom stating that these channels may no longer be available on Dish Network and to call Dish Network and ask for them to keep their programming.

I saw the same crawl when watching the Chappelle Show on Comedy Central. Well, I saw the beginning of it anyway. Then it was blocked out by a big black bar at the bottom of the screen. The black bar was Echostar's doing. I understand Echostar violated their carriage agreement by doing that.

Here's an interesting news item that might make Echostar and Viacom want to rethink their increased pricing (this from a CNN report):

quote:
February is one of the television industry's "sweeps" periods, when ratings are used to set local TV advertising rates, and Sony said that 65 percent of its online gaming audience during TV's prime time -- 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. week nights -- were men aged 18 to 34.

I have to admit, I am more often working on my computer and using my DSL line during prime time rather than watching TV at all. So honestly, I should get a price break and so should companies advertising on TV.

That little video game study will be a nice tidbit for me to use to underscore the importance of investing in signs as a retail business' most important and most visible marketing tool. TV don't matter!!!

The clock is ticking on those guys. I can live without cable or satellite TV. I've done it before. With the greed being displayed, those f**kers at Viacom and Echostar can starve for all I care.

[ 03-09-2004, 02:12 PM: Message edited by: Bobby Henderson ]

Posted by Aaron Sisemore (Member # 145) on 03-09-2004, 12:42 PM:

Cartoon Network isn't a Viacom product. (it's owned by TimeWarner).

-Aaron

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 03-09-2004, 01:02 PM:

quote:

Bobby Henderson: ... I can live with cable or satellite TV. ...

You can live without TV all together if you really want. I did it for almost 2 years. After that, it's been almost 2 years that I only have local network channels off-air.

After a while you'll stop missing TV. After that, when you watch TV again you'll say, "What am I missing?... Nothing!" Suddenly, you'll realize how addicting television really is and how little you really get out of it for the money you put into it!

My wife and I watch, maybe, a couple hours of TV at night before we go to bed. Neither of us see any wisdom in paying $40 - $50 per month for the kind of crap they try to stuff down your throat!

Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 03-09-2004, 01:19 PM:

Aarons right. Cartoon Network is still up.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 03-09-2004, 02:19 PM:

The Cartoon Network thing was just a quick off-the-cuff guess (I thought the same company that owned Nickelodeon owned all those kiddie channels).

I'm pretty serious about turning off that satellite dish, especially if there aren't any immediately attractive offers from rival DirecTV. Lawton Cablevision here is a laughable joke and local vertical monopoly. I'll put a sledgehammer through my TV set before ever becoming a customer of theirs.

With many cable TV series having season sets being released on DVD to buy and/or rent, there's not nearly as much pressure to subscribe as there used to be.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 03-09-2004, 02:31 PM:

Yeah! What we do when we want to watch something different is go to the video store and rent what we want. We pop some popcorn (Whirley Pop! Not that microwave shtuff!) light a fire in the fireplace and curl up on the sofa.

There are people who spend 12 X $50 = $600 per year to have cable TV and $1000+ to have a super duper home video system. We spend, maybe, $100 per year on TV!

If there's a movie that we want to watch, we'll occasionally go see it in the theater but, to tell the truth, that's too much like WORK to me! [Wink]

Posted by Gary Crawford (Member # 2038) on 03-09-2004, 02:36 PM:

I'm not trying to say to move to another service here...

My first home small sat dish service was, and still is, DirecTV. They haven't done me wrong at all, price stays steady, quality is always there. Mounted a dual-LNB mini dish and have 2 IRDs and I've had no complaints. With the problems with Viacom maybe the other services will offer some nice deals again.

Only problems I ever had were dish full of snow (and close enough to the ground to sweep out) and during a real bad thunderstorm (twice) I lost signal for a few minutes but I can live with those problems.

Posted by Jack Ondracek (Member # 1466) on 03-09-2004, 11:35 PM:

Echostar's position is that Viacom wants a 40% increase over the life of their new contract term, whatever that is (they don't say). In the Seattle market, all those channels are down now, replaced by funky organ music and an invitation to complain to Viacom.

It's kinda funny, really. This sort of stuff goes on all the time between content providers and cable systems. Guess we've been insulated up to this point.

No biggie to me though. I can live without all those channels... never watch 'em & don't really have a problem that my kids can't either (though they don't seem to care as much as I thought they would).

As for the quality, yah, it blows, but considering they're putting 4,000 channels up on 3 satellites with a 12" pizza pan for a dish, you probably can't reasonably compare it to C-band.

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 03-09-2004, 11:42 PM:

Split an analog cable subscription with a neighbor.

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 03-09-2004, 11:45 PM:

Dish net sucks as much as "digital" cable anyway! Their picture quality is shit!

Change to DirecTV! They rule!

>>> Phil

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 03-09-2004, 11:48 PM:

quote:
As for the quality, yah, it blows, but considering they're putting 4,000 channels up on 3 satellites with a 12" pizza pan for a dish, you probably can't reasonably compare it to C-band.

Sure you can. It looks 4000 / (24 * 3) times worse than C-band. Not to mention it's digital so it looks inherently bad. Even worse than the digital channels on C-band.

Posted by John Westlund (Member # 913) on 03-10-2004, 01:20 AM:

I just saw a commercial on Comedy Central that said "now only available on cable and DirecTV."

Posted by Robb Johnston (Member # 239) on 03-10-2004, 06:15 PM:

viacom took out a full page ad in (at least) the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Some excerpts:

"Echostar/Dish Network has yanked your favorite channels"

"You have been just been left high and dry without spongebob!"

"EchoStar/DISH Network recently raised your rates by as much as $3.00 a month. And yet they refuse to pay us less than six cents a month more so that you can continue to see all of your favorite shows on the channels we provide."

They list national numbers to get in touch with local cable providers and DirecTV and list a website for more propaganda/information.

I see this going on for a while

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 03-11-2004, 03:18 PM:

Apparently Echostar and Viacom have settled their differences and channels like Comedy Central and MTV are in the process of being restored to Dish Network.

I'd really like to know all the specific details behind what caused the flap to happen and also how it got settled. Both sides have been throwing around some very fuzzy figures and issuing tough responses to the claims made by opposing sides. Echostar's CEO scoffed at the 6 cents per subscriber claim coming from Viacom, stating if that's really all they wanted the issue would have been settled a long time ago instead of being brought into Anti-Trust litigation.

They're all just greedy bastards. I'm still considering the choice to just turn off my satellite service. It would be a real easy choice if I didn't regularly watch HBO series shows like "The Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under" or the various news channels. But even those channels are not above sacrifice.

Posted by Jesse Skeen (Member # 586) on 03-11-2004, 03:29 PM:

As long as they still have those constant onscreen logos, they would have to pay ME to watch them! I had free cable a while ago and still didn't watch anything on it!

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 03-11-2004, 03:35 PM:

Bobby,

Although I have HBO, I never watch shows like "THE SOPRANOS", "SIX FEET UNDER", "OZ" and "BAND OF BROTHERS" on television. I wait for the shows to come out on DVD and watch them at that time by renting the discs for a couple of nights. The only HBO show I watched during it's two Sunday night run was "ANGELS IN AMERICA" and it was excellent!

By the way, the DVD image does not have the HBO logo on the bottom right hand side of the screen. [Smile]

-Claude

Posted by Brad Allen (Member # 470) on 03-11-2004, 04:02 PM:

Nor is there the HBO logo on HBO-HD.
HBO-HD Beats a DVD any day.

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 03-11-2004, 04:13 PM:

By any chance, does the Dish Network software let you see (display) the channel's current bitrate?

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 03-11-2004, 08:47 PM:

quote:
As long as they still have those constant onscreen logos, they would have to pay ME to watch them!

HBO usually doesn't flash their logos on the screen during a movie or any of their other shows. Other networks like Showtime have been common offenders of logo spammage in the past. Logo spamming usually occurs with the cable networks who air commercials. Some other channels like IFC (Independent Film Channel) are pretty bad about logo spamming.

quote:
Does the Dish Network software let you see (display) the channel's current bitrate?

As far as I can tell it does not. I've wondered what kind of video and audio bitrates are used for their programming.

For instance a number of pay per view movie and premium cable channels on Dish Network often feature shows with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. I strongly suspect the DD 5.1 audio is presented in bitrates as low as 256kb/s or 192kb/s (DD 5.1 can be encoded at those data rates). Channel separation is often not very good and there is often a slightly muddy quality to it. A few weeks ago, I did a comparison between an HBO showing of "Speed" in DD 5.1 versus the 2-disc DVD I have of the same film. Both DD 5.1 and DTS 5.1 tracks on the DVD sounded very noticeably better than the DD 5.1 playing back on HBO.

Posted by Dave Williams (Member # 299) on 03-12-2004, 08:52 AM:

Dish Network made it big by using mpeg2 compression before directTV had a chance to upgrade its systems.

HOWEVER...

Charlie Ergan.. Egan.. whatever his name is...

He has tried to stay a step ahead of directTV since they upgraded thier systems to mpeg2 years ago.

How does he do this? Funny you should make me ask myself this question. He carries more and more channels than directTV can accomodate. So he has had to increase the size of the dish itself, and also launch more satellites into space to broadcast this insane amount of useless programming to the rednecks of our society under every damned rock you can find them.

HOWEVER...

even with a new change in dish coming in the next two years.. (its nearly 4 feet wide children), to accomodate HD signals, there is one thing that DISH has gotten very good at...

COMPRESSING SHOWS beyond decent or acceptable levels.

Some networks have compression ratios of nearly 10/1, they are that bad.

However, I have not seen this level of arrogance in DirectTV. Thier compression ratios remain at much more sane levels, for the most part undetectable by most humans.

Direct TV has refused to partake in the channel adding game.

Now VIACOM tried to force DiSH to take channels it did not want. Now there is a unique thing to hear. Dish not pushing more useless channels that no one can see or hear anyway.

I used to be a big fan of DISH. however, thier compressions are too heavy and I cannot watch many networks. I cancelled my service mid last year and will only work with direct tv in the future.

Even with ol charlies fightin words and tacticts, directTV still has more customers. Could be that most people aren't as dumb as charlie thinks?

Imagine if Dish was able to buy out DIrect TV last year as ol charlie wanted? Thank god that Mr. Simpson.. i mean Mr. Murdoch got it instead.

Ciao

Dave

Posted by Jeff Taylor (Member # 443) on 03-12-2004, 11:03 AM:

FWIW: Dish and Viacom "kissed and made up". All is now well in satellite land.

Posted by Thomas Procyk (Member # 1170) on 03-12-2004, 12:30 PM:

Our local cable company a while back offered a service called "CableSelect" where they'd install a box in your house and you would pick and choose what channels you wanted and paid by the month by the channel.

The popular ones like Comedy Central, CNN, Nickelodeon, and MTV ran about $0.25 - $0.35 a month each. The less popular ones like Food Network, Lifetime and the shopping channels were about $0.15 each, right on down to C-SPAN which was $0.03

The program probably never took off because the only time I heard about it was the initial mailing. I did the math and it would actually cost us MORE a month (you had to pay a $7 per month fee for the box) with LESS channels than the standard package. But I guess it would be good for people who only need those 6 or 7 cable channels in addition to broadcast.

=TMP=