ABC Versus Cablevision: Could Both Lose?

Short answer: both are already losing. Cablevision's trying to play the sympathy card, and failing. ABC's losing three million viewers in the Northeast for tonight's Oscar telecast because of their own greed.

Cablevision is playing hardball, as businesses that are supposed to make money do. They pay a lot of money for access to cable networks, and we pay them a lot of money to bring them to us. When their prices get too high, we cancel; when network providers' prices get too high, Cablevision cancels. If they do it sloppily, which they did earlier this year with the Food Network/HGTV fiasco resulting from their sloppy negotiations with Scripps Cable, and which they're doing now with the ABC/Disney fiasco, they incur the wrath of angry customers, who threaten (and occasionally actually) cancel.

The Food Network/HGTV thing was interesting, in that there were so many ways Cablevision could have handled it better. Having replacement channels ready to go would have been a good idea...anything other than the whining they did on the channels where the Scripps networks had gone missing. And they're doing it again on the ABC broadcast channels - nobody liked it the last time, and nobody's handling it well now.

But ABC/Disney is only in this position because they thought they could make money off of over-the-air stations they're already making money off of.

Let's go back a few years. Cable companies once lived entirely by a provision called "Must Carry" - basically, if a TV signal was receivable in a cable company's service area, the cable company was obligated to carry it. No ifs, ands or buts. This gave a livelihood to a lot of fringe stations that wouldn't have been carried under other circumstances - in the New York area, for instance, it's why so many people were able to watch the Uncle Floyd Show when it emanated from a small shack in West Orange, NJ. The signal was receivable within the areas the cable companies served, and so cable companies were obligated to carry it...so we got to see The Ramones and Squeeze on television before anyone else did, thanks to "Must Carry". I call that "value for your cable dollar".

The bigger broadcast stations kvetched heartily about this, partly because they saw someone else making money off of what they saw as their turf (even though they wouldn't have had nearly as many viewers without cable) but mostly because it put the tiniest TV stations on more of an even footing with them. Remember, when big business complains about something, it's most likely not the issue they're complaining about that's actually bothering them - it's the one they can't talk about for fear of alienating the public. And if there's one thing big business can't stand, it's competition.

So the FCC buckled under to their whining and gave them an opportunity to make money off the cable systems, by charging the cable systems to carry them. If they did this, however, the "Must Carry" rule no longer applied...the cable company was free to tell them to go take a flying leap.

Nobody's taken more advantage of this than ABC/Disney, since they're the proud corporate parents of ESPN, a massively-watched cable service. ABC/Disney has made carriage of ESPN a part of a package deal that includes both their troubled channels (ABC Family) and their over-the-air channels on the ABC network. (Fox has done the same, using Fox Broadcasting's over-the-air stations as a chip to bargain for carriage of their less-watched cable networks. That explains the TimeWarner Cable foofahrah earlier this year. It's been a big year for cable skulduggery.)

By making the ABC Television Network a bargaining chip in the cable industry, ABC/Disney made it vulnerable to exactly these sorts of shenanigans - and no matter how much ill will Cablevision generates, ABC/Disney has allowed business strategy to get in the way of the basic purpose of the ABC Television Network - to fulfill their responsibility as a broadcaster as much of the public as possible.

Over-the-air broadcasters should remember that they are broadcasters first, and their business decisions should support that. ABC is now only reaping the fruits of policies sown years ago; they should recognize that and change course. "Must-carry" is the only sane way to run a broadcast network; Cablevision should be delivering viewers to their doorstep for a payment of exactly zero.

UPDATE: It appears that this is, indeed, the result of a long negotiation between Cablevision and ABC over the entire cable package - and Cablevision's claim that ABC's trying to bump up their fee by 20% seems to hold water. It was ABC that pulled the plug on their Cablevision feed of WABC in New York just after broadcasting an angry message, casting it as a reason their viewers have to "Save ABC 7".

The truth, Cablevision viewers, is that the fate of your ABC viewing is firmly in ABC's hands, no matter what ABC's ads tell you.