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New Year, new deal for Time Warner and Viacom

Time Warner Cable customers have been saved - they'll still be able to watch SpongeBob Squarepants and other shows from Viacom. The cable company carries 19 channels from Viacom including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, but was refusing to pay increased fees for them. However, the two companies said yesterday that they …

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Efros
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That's the best they offer

"Viacom's best known shows include The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Dora the Explorer."

US sad attempt at satire, the yanks just don't get political satire at all, and a cartoon scream machine, I personally can do without this crap.

Anonymous Coward
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Another problem

Between distributors of "licensed" material and their customers? What a frikkin suprise. Cable is already overpriced everywhere for the crap that's on there...especially since you really don't get much choice in what you see (or pay for). You either take it or leave it or upgrade to some other (more expensive) level to get what you really only wanted to see in the first place. who really needs 50 music channels, 30 bod-botherers, 35 sell-it-to-you-cheap, 25 baseball, football, basketball, golf channels? Greedy Morons.

Peyton
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MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon

Whew! Glad they were able to reach an agreement. It would be tragic to see our three main educational channels made unavailable. (For adolescents, adults, and kids respectively)

James O'Brien
Stop

Who cares?

And here I was hoping we were free of MTV for a change. So now we are stuck with yet another 10 years of a station that has lost its way over a decade ago. Discovery FTW

kissingthecarpet

Re: Another problem

US cable may be crap, but my Virgin cable is pretty good. Yes, there is a load of shite on but also a lot of good stuff. There is an EPG and the ability to automatically change to the desired programme when it comes on. So you spend a short time reviewing whats on & setting up reminders. The more channels, the more chance of a good programme being on at any time. Although there are fewer rubbish channels than you get on Sky.There's also the iPlayer, and several other channels equivalent thrown in & an 'archive' of older stuff.

I know it sounds like an advert for them, but when I compare it to the days of 3,4,5 channels not even on 24/7 its a huge improvement.

Anonymous Coward
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Too much evil from Vilecon already

<breathless raving rant>

There really is no good way to get TV in the US-all cable systems are overpriced, only feature about half the channels in digital, and charge out the ass ("Suddenlink" is a prime example, as well as a stupid name), pay satellite is cheaper but forces you into a contract forever and requires you to get the most expensive package just to get the three channels you actually want. The only semi-decent option is FTA satellite, and that usually requires a big dish and has a limited selection of channels-as a lot of channels available for free elsewhere (eg; History) are scrambled here in the states.

With that in mind it seems totally pointless for so-called content providers to charge the cable companies more, as they'll just pass the inflated price right on to their customer's already over-inflated bills. Such behavior is especially unwarranted out of Viacom(I suggest the new name of "Vilecon")-haven't they already been evil enough lately with the YouTube fiasco?

Most importantly, why the hell are we PAYING TO WATCH THEIR DAMN COMMERCIALS?

</breathless raving rant>

Steen Hive
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@kissingthecarpet

"I know it sounds like an advert for them, but when I compare it to the days of 3,4,5 channels not even on 24/7 its a huge improvement."

Not by any definition of "improvement" extant in the English language.

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