Written by Joe Tetreault | 07 March 2010

When 2009 became 2010, Cablevision subscribers got a crap sandwich from their cable provider and the company that owns two of the cable networks broadcast on Cablevision, Scripps. The dispute was resolved, but weeks of programming was not aired on Cablevision. As any fan of Alton Brown's brilliant Good Eats program, the outage was intolerable. I could not point an antenna at the sky and receive the Food Network. Nor could I log into iTunes and find Good Eats to subscribe to the current season or download old episodes. Though HGTV is out there, Food Network isn't.

Flash forward to tonight. When last night turned into tomorrow, Cablevision struck again and purged both WABC and WTNH from my cable dial. In 68 hours or so, when LOST comes on a large number of fanatics are going to be insanely upset at the two corporations who can't agree on how much to charge the individuals who sustain them. Instead the distributor has plugged the plug on the distributed and left us in the lurch.

In Danny DeVito's dark comedy classic The War of the Roses Michael Douglas' character, Oliver Rose, elects to unnecessarily antagonize his wife during their already contentious divorce.  Notoriously at a dinner party his wife is hosting, Oliver arrives, inebriated and urinates on the fish that has just been extracted from the broiler.  In that scenario Oliver's wife is the aggreived whose preparations have gone for naught thanks to the petulance of her soon to be ex-husband.

Oliver is Cablevision.  His wife is Disney.  We the viewers are the guests and the shows we pay cablevision to deliver to us are the fish.

Thanks, Cablevision. You suck.

And don't get me wrong, it's hard picking you as the villain when you are going up against the largest vertically integrate media conglomerate on planet earth. But clearly, you are. Scripps didn't have issues anywhere else. Disney, the owner of ABC, and content provider for both WABC and WTNH, clearly has no interest in losing the market for their flagship station in the largest media market in the US.  Sure, they could concede, but so could you. All I know is that once again, one of the few reasons I still pay you for service will be denied me.  Way to ensure I stay with you when the introductory offer ends in four months.

I have recourse in this instance, though.

I can stick an antenna out the window and get the ABC shows I want to watch.

I can download shows from iTunes.

I can do any number of things to get my programming.  This is called disintermediation, and to you this is death.

This fight is one that Cablevision should not want. Niche programming that finds its way into maybe a million households nationwide cannot compare with a major broadcast network. Not just that, but a broadcast network that has whipped its largest fan base into a furor over the final ten episodes of one of its more successful dramas in recent history.

I gotta ask you, Cablevision, do you punks feel lucky?

Cablevision will be disintermediated quickly by its younger customers who are more flexible and willing to change. Underestimating that dynamic is lethal, but more than that it is unnecessarily foolish. Cablevision has rarely been accused of being smart. Their consistent refusal to carry the NFL Network has pushed more young men my age towards FIOS or a dish than anything Verizon or DirecTV has ever done. The decision to put the kibosh on ABC must be considered in the same vein of utterly colossal stupidity.

UPDATE: WTNH is back on the air.  Last night when I typed this up, Channel 8 on Cablevision was a black screen, but programming is on now.  Perhaps not as colossal a foul up as previously reported, but there still will be plenty of upset Cablevision customers.

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