Thursday, December 31, 2009 — 11:25 p.m. — 20.7°F
It’s late on New Year’s Eve, and what’s at the top of a lot of people’s thoughts as the year ends?
Whether they will be able to watch Cincinnati vs. Florida in tomorrow’s Sugar Bowl on their televisions.
News Corp., the Fox Network’s parent company, doesn’t make as much money as they would like from advertising revenue on their shows. So they want to improve another revenue source. They decided to increase the amount they charge Time Warner’s Bright House Networks for the privilege of carrying Fox programming on their various cable outlets, to the tune of $1 for each of Bright House’s cable subscribers. News Corp.’s current arrangement with Bright House expires with the end of the year, at midnight.
News Corp. and Bright House are in a Mexican standoff.
The problem with issuing an ultimatum like that is that the other guy might not blink. If Bright House decides to dump Fox’s programming, not only will Fox not receive the additional blackmail revenue they want, but their advertising revenue will decrease because they will have lost 13 million viewers on Bright House’s cable outlets.
We’ve seen similar head-butting with threats to drop cable channels in past years between other parties, and agreements have always been reached before anyone got hurt. After all, with the loss of Fox’s programming, Bright House would ultimately lose customers and money too. Most companies are more concerned with their own bottom line than they are at retaliating at another company that’s trying to stick it to them, so there’s a good chance a last second deal will be worked out, or at least an agreement for an extended negotiation period. The stakes are high—who wants to lose access to The Simpsons?
If a deal is not reached, all of the Fox network broadcast programming could be dropped as well as the cable channels FX, Speed, FuelTV, Fox Reality, Fox Soccer, and Fox Sports en Espanol, along with some regional sports channels. Unfortunately, Fox News is unrelated and is not affected by this dispute, and will continue to spew its lies at all of its current victims regardless of the outcome of this standoff.
Football fans to the rescue? Two University of Florida alumni tried to make sure tomorrow’s Sugar Bowl game is carried by their cable provider. Not willing to trust the two parties to settle their tiff themselves, Thomas Moore and Richard Anderson hired some legal guns to file a temporary injunction against News Corp. to prevent them from withholding Fox Network programming, even for a short period. The filing claims the Sugar Bowl is “an event of undeniable public interest” and were Moore and Anderson to miss it they “can never be made whole again.” They also “have alleged and will demonstrate that [News Corp.’s] actions are immoral, unethical, oppressive, and unscrupulous.”
That last part sounds like it could be a reworded charge originally targeting Faux News.
Alas, Moore and Anderson saw a Federal judge reject their request to consider the matter just a few hours ago. The judge explained that her court was not the proper place for the dispute, and sent it back to a Florida district court. The Florida court judge had previously ruled that the dispute wasn’t appropriate for that court either. Nobody wants this particular can of worms.
Perhaps Moore and Anderson will discover they enjoy watching legal ping pong more than Florida football.
