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Wednesday, December 31, 2008

One Last Post About Cable Channel Changes

For those of you who read this blog regularly this is going to sound very familiar. We have discussed it already quite a lot, but confusing crawls across the bottom of many of our cable channels are resulting in phone calls to our switchboard, so this is one more attempt to explain what is happening.

First thing first. The big news all over many cable news shows today is about a battle between Viacom (owners of several cable channels like: Comedy Central, CMT: Pure Country, MTV, MTV 2, MTV Hits, MTV Jams, MTV Tr3s, Nickelodeon, Noggin, Nicktoons, Spike, The N, TV Land, VH1, VH1 Classic, and VH1 Soul) are in a bitter cost dispute with cable systems owned by Time Warner. Apparently Time Warner is refusing to pay what Viacom is asking beginning on January 1 and they are willing to express that displeasure by turning all those channels off as the ball drops tonight on Time Square. While this is exciting, it has nothing to do with us here in Glasgow. No matter what happens in this dispute, it will not impact your programming from Glasgow EPB.

It would be wonderful if that were the end of the story, but, it isn't. Hundreds of small independent cable operators like us are also in a dispute with NBCU (owners of cable channels on our system like: MSNBC, CNBC, USA, BRAVO, SCI-FI and NBCU-HD).
While we are fairly confident that we will reach an agreement with them on price, there continues to be the chance that NBCU will turn these channels off until we reach an agreement. If you wake up to nothing on these channel positions on New Year's Day, this would be the reason.

Other changes are the ones we have talked about many times over the last month. The latest information on these changes can be seen by watching EPB Cable6.

Oh, and Happy New Year!!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Why has G4 been taken off?

Billy Ray said...

It was moved up to the digital tier to save money that will be used to pay these greedy broadcasters. It was judged to be a bit less popular than other programming on the Glasgow Classic tier.

Dan Moody said...

Is WSMV Nashville still coming to the EPB lineup?

Billy Ray said...

Yes it is Dan. We are waiting for some new equipment to receive its digital signal properly. It should appear soon and I will keep everyone updated on our progress.