Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Greed

Wow, last night while surfing through the tv channels looking for geek ideas for my next batch of Working Daze cartoons I ran into a message basically telling me as it stands now Time Warner (my cable provider) will be eliminating 19 Viacom channels from their lineup as of Midnight tonight. The channel list includes such family favorites as Comedy Central and Nick. It seems the two media giants can not agree on the worth of these stations. So two of the biggest companies in the US are bickering pretty much at the expense of the customers.

Out of the entire list the only one I really watch is Comedy Central for the Daily Show and the Colbert report. Those can both be seen online if needed. So truthfully my life won't be altered much at all by TWC eliminating 19 channels. But and this is a big but, it's the thought that counts. It kind of bugs me that TWC would so readily just dispose of 19 channels many of their customers enjoy just because they and Viacom are basically having a big company "peeing contest". I know companies have to put profits and the bottom line first, but at some point I would think somebody high up on the food chain of these companies would say, "you know we make enough money, let's find a nice medium ground where we can both be happy and also give our customers what they want."

Yes I am naive. You can tell I write comics and science fiction for a living. Still hopefully customers will complain enough and common ground will be found. This way we can all watch the Daily Show on our TVs with our DVRs instead of our computers.

Man, I can't wait for the arrival of "cable ala carte" where we can just pick and pay for the stations we want!

And yes this will show up in Working Daze!

Happy New Year all!

4 comments:

Hari said...

I've never seen what sort of customer contract Time Warner might have, but I'd absolutely love to hear that this violates them in some way and it costs them more that paying the increased fees would have. I bet their competition is already starting to film commercials focusing on this incident.

Johnzakour said...

I am glad the dispute was settled. It's nice when people get along.

Parson said...

The bad things, when they take away those 19 channels, your cable bill won't go down one penny.

Unknown said...

As an aside can you please stop using Photos in your strip, it detracts a lot from the pleasure of reading it and seems to cheapen it considerably