(Update, 8:55 pm: The WABC feed was restored. Cablevision said it made made significant progress to come to terms with ABC.)
A dispute over what Cablevision New York should pay for ABC’s free-to-air broadcast signals turned ugly at the stroke of midnight Saturday as the Disney-owned network made good on its threat to cut the signal, putting into doubt whether the cable system’s three million area customers would get to see the Oscars Sunday night.
But from this epic tragedy — I say this purely as a objective journalist and not as a Cablevision customer who will spend part of Sunday configuring an HD antenna to satisfy my customers, a film-obsessed teenage daughter and star-gazing wife — can spring a fantastic opportunity.
Should the dispute not be resolved in the 19 hours or so until the Oscars will be seen by everyone else, ABC could and should stream it live. No special video players. No registration. No questions asked: Surf on over to ABC.com and join our Oscars party. Just leave the webcast going after the red-carpet show is over.
(Update, 5 pm Sunday: Cablevision said it would agree to binding arbitration if ABC agreed to restore the signal to its customers. ABC did not immediately respond.)
Heaven knows that preparing for this eventuality could have been in the works for ages. (Who is to blame in your opinion? Be sure to take our poll at the end of this post) The midnight-hour deadline was well known, and there was little hope either party would pull back from the brink of what has been a two-year dispute centered on Disney’s demand for what Cablevision says is a $40 million hike in the fee that it pays to pass along the network’s broadcast feed, and other Disney channels, to its customers.
(The messy situation nearly became an unmitigated disaster as every single broadcast station went black on Cablevision along with ABC. Service was restored to the other New York area stations, broadcast on local channels 2, 4, 5, 9, 11 and 13, returned about 20 minutes later. But channel 7 — WABC — stayed black.)
Cablevision is still smarting from a PR disaster only last January when the popular Food and Style networks were pulled for three weeks in a similar dispute with Scripps Networks Interactive.
But this is the Oscars. And, depending on your personal tastes, this is “Lost.” And “Desperate Housewives.” And “Live with Regis and Kelly” and “The View.” True, many ABC shows are available sometime after broadcast on ABC.com. Many people have just cut the cord, eschewing all pay services for downloads, free and pay-per-episode a la carte online viewing and torrents. And HD broadcasts are standard now, so if you can find what is sometimes an elusive signal you have a cable-quality experience, unlike the old days before June 12, 2009.
This is a live broadcast that rivals the Super Bowl for buzz and attention. This is the Academy Awards, which people love to hate and say they hate to watch but can’t stop talking about before, during and after.
While most people might take their frustrations out on Cablevision, which they pay directly — Twitter was immediately filled with venomous, all-cap, curse-filled Tweets about both parties, but seemingly more about #cablevision — it is a fact that Disney/ABC chose not to go along anymore with the status quo.
That will dawn on everyone at some point even if the dry-gulch stalemate goes on long enough (for me, purely objective journalist, that milestone will occur on Tuesday at 9 pm) even if the conglomerate is seeking fair remuneration for its intellectual property and as has been very patient — as it would contend.
But they can take an enormous stab at gaining a permanent upper hand in the PR war by magnanimously making the fans of their programming whole, aligning themselves in the propaganda war with the fight’s true victims. It’s hard to see how any financial losses would be more than marginal, and by doing “everything we can to ensure that our customers are not inconvenienced by this petty dispute” they could instantly change the conversation.
It’s not normally in the economic interest of a broadcaster to compete with itself online with a revenue-rich program. NBC kept real-time Winter Olympics competitions off the internet (again), and even off TV — putting many contests whose outcomes were known hours earlier to anyone who cared into prime time. And it’s hard to imagine the Super Bowl on YouTube live anytime soon.
But circumstances may have conspired to serve up the perfect test case to see if the Neilsen ratings for a significantly lucrative broadcast are helped, hurt or unaffected by having it available as a live internet simulcast. Seriously, how many people would opt for that, outside the Cablevision blackout zone? And what advertiser wouldn’t like their spots passing through the interwebs, too?
And when the dispute with Cablevision is over, ABC can always said that it’s ending the “pilot program.” Some people will gripe but nobody would blame them much.
But maybe by then the fates will have taught them enough to know whether it’s a good idea, whether the stranglehold that packagers like cable and satellite companies still have can endure the one-two punch of over-the-air HD programming and the internet’s uncanny ability to make boundaries meaningless.
Is there enough server power in Disney-land to do this, even on a limited basis? No idea. But ABC is a huge operation and I bet there are a few whitepapers floating around the CTO’s office on this very subject.
It’s a cliché, but true: For every door that closes, another opens. It may not have welcomed this crisis, but ABC could capitalize on it and change the game.
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