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There's a saying I first learned from my father. This being a family newspaper, I will have to translate one variant of the adage into Official English: Do not step into a urinating competition between skunks.
That's good advice, but sometimes you can't avoid the skunks, and that happened to us last week. We were among those DISH Network customers who lost several channels for a few days.
I have friends who get satellite TV because that's the only way way they can get TV, but that doesn't apply here. A local non-profit association operates a repeater that carries most of the Denver TV stations to most of the population of this county, and there is cable TV service in town.
I've tried both. As long as we used the repeater, I even sent in my $35 suggested annual donation. Every fall, they cut off service, or threatened to cut off service, until they get enough money for another year. But even though my conscience was clear, a neighbor ran an arc welder at odd hours, and so our picture wasn't clear.
I gave up on cable when our local monopoly, then part of
John Malone's empire, accepted $10 a head from Rupert
Murdoch to install Fox News as part of the regular lineup.
I didn't mind the addition, since it is good to know what
your enemies are thinking; it's called
intelligence.
But I did mind that our cable package removed KRMA and the Weather Channel to make room for Fox News and UPN.
Soon it was possible to get the Denver channels on one of those little dishes that wouldn't eat up our small yard. Plus, the house next door had a new owner -- a guy that sold and installed the little dishes. So I figured service wouldn't be a problem if I had trouble.
That was in the summer of 2000. By and large, the dish has worked well, bringing in scores of channels that I don't watch, like eight flavors of ESPN. There are occasional glitches, but there were glitches with cable and the repeater, too.
Plus, the dish has stuff I've never encountered anywhere else, like FSTV, which really is biased liberal media, and RFDTV, often featuring antique farm machinery expositions and steam-powered rail excursions.
Then came last week's struggle between Echostar Communications, which does business as the DISH Network beaming signals from satellites to our little dishes, and Viacom, which owns CBS, BET, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon and VH1.
The contract had run out, and they couldn't agree on how much Echostar should pay Viacom for carrying its programs.
I was of the opinion that Echostar shouldn't pay Viacom anything, let alone more. After all, all these channels carry plenty of advertising. The more viewers, the higher the ad rates. Echostar actually makes it possible for them to reach more viewers and thus make more money.
Neither company revealed much in the way of specifics, but Echostar did accuse Viacom of bundling -- forcing Echostar to buy and carry programming it didn't want in order to get the programming it did want.
I don't like that; in order to get ABC programs that I might watch, I have to pay about $2 a month for ESPN which I don't watch.
Further, Viacom's public statements bordered on the
ludicrous, like this from Mark Rosenthal, president of MTV:
Americans spend more than 20 percent of their TV viewing
time watching our networks, yet our fees amount to less
than 5 percent of what Echostar generates from their
average customer.
Yes, and on most mornings, I spend more time on the crossword puzzle in the Denver Post than on any other page of the newspaper. But if the puzzle syndicate started trying to charge accordingly, I suspect the Post's management would find another source of puzzles.
Martha and I speculated that Echostar might try
something similar, like out-sourcing, and we could watch
shows like CSI: Bombay
and Judging Amigo.
From what I read, though, most of Echostar's 9 million customers felt differently. They wanted their MTV. So Echostar couldn't hold the line against bundling and carriage-fee increases, and customer rate increases will doubtless follow.
And at some point, I may not follow, even though I like TV.
That confession may keep me from being invited to the next meeting of the Society of Condescending Intellectual Snobs. But if you spend most of your working time in thought, you need to relax your brain after work, and the only method that works better than TV involves controlled substances, some of which are addictive. TV can be addictive, too, which might explain why so many people are willing to pay ever increasing monthly bills for TV.
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