Viacom vs. Time Warner: Waiting for the Ball to Drop

How badly do you want your MTV?

As of this post, Viacom may pull its stations from Time Warner Cable in the US if they do not meet their increased fee demands. If everything falls through, these stations will go dark as of 12:01 am New Year's Day - which, in my opinion, could be a more interesting way to rollover than some of the other live countdown specials on TV. No more Daily Show, Colbert, and SpongeBob (I'm not crying over the last one all that much). I love corporate media drama.

In other "give us money for our creative content" news, there's the whole Warner/Fox Watchmen thing. I've seen the trailer (never read the comic), and have been looking forward to the movie for a while. I just hope it doesn't end up in a vault somewhere as the studios have it out in court indefinitely.

Ah, the media. I loved the idea of cable stations offering their content on the web - until they restricted all the good stuff to the United States. I'm looking at you, Hulu.

Sure, the Canadian affiliates are offering some of the same on their sites, but not all of it. And if I do want to watch last night's SNL sketches, I'll have to wait a full week from the broadcast date to catch them on globaltv.com (or that limited window between someone uploading the bits to YouTube and NBC Universal ordering them pulled).

I was part of the Colbert Nation back when the site was built in the mock-Angelfire, animated GIF-laden style. Now, with all the prompts to visit The Comedy Network for my video fix, I'm somewhat dissuaded to take part in the fun.

That's all. Happy New Year!

Photo by A Syn.