Since it's almost three days later, maybe this qualifies as an irrelevant question to ask -- but are there any companies out there more clueless than Disney/ABC and Cablevision?
I
ask this, of course, after the Oscars debacle, which left three million Cablevision subscribers staring at blank TV screens instead of the beginning of the second-most watched show on TV -- all
because the companies were locked in a fight-to-the-death over whether Cablevision should be paying ABC a hefty retransmission fee. Cable subscribers were caught in the middle of this battle, as
though they had no voice at all.
Damn! None of us Cablevision subscribers could walk up to Cablevision's headquarters and plug ABC back in -- and both companies knew that! Still, if
ever there was a time when it doesn't pay to make consumers pawns, it's right now. We can broadcast online how we feel about it, just the way the two companies can use up their own precious ad time to
air commercials trying to state their case.Here are a few examples of what people said as the crisis was unfolding:
• God Bless the rabbit ears. They saved the Oscars. F*ck cablevision
and ABC
• After last nite's Oscars fiasco w/ Cablevision, I feel like I live in the CORPORATE States Of Amercia. And I don't like it one bit.
• ABC and Cablevision: use me as leverage
at your peril. Consumer already looking for alternative distribution models and content sources
• I'm streaming the academyawards live on hatroulette - sorry abc and cablevision, you're
both monumental losers
• Watching oscars and hoping cablevision doesn't give ABC their $40 million. I'm sick of the feuds and channels holding viewers hostage.
Are any of these
comments surprising? No. But what may be surprising to both ABC and Cablevision -- since it's so obvious they are not listening to their customers -- is that no one is sympathetic toward either of
them. ABC's abominable decision to use the Oscars as a bargaining tool aside, the two company's dismal, political-campaign-style advertising smelled funny to anyone who saw it, no matter how far
either company went in trying to tell its side of the story. (This has certainly been true of other retrans feuds as well.)
Cablevision actually dared to repeatedly air a
four-minute-long infomercial about the dispute, as if the threat of pulling the Oscars broadcast hadn't wasted enough of our mental space; ABC attempted to demonize Cablevision by claiming that it was pocketing $500 million of its subscribers' money every year, implying that that money should have been paid to ABC. By
making commercials all about their problems -- without taking us into account -- no one won, not even the victor of the retrans battle.
The only truth unveiled by all this is that
consumers, powerless to actually force the Oscars onto the air, ended up taking it out on both companies. It doesn't really matter to them who's at fault, and that's a lesson future combatants in the
retransmission wars need to learn. No consumer is going to shed a tear for either company in these battles, though they will get very ticked off if they don't get the programming they paid for.
Speaking of future retransmission wars, which are more or less fated the way things are going, there's only one thing missing from the current state-of-the-art of public whining by cable operators,
media companies and consumers: a social-media-led consumer protest that is organized enough to have real-world consequences. I saw a few people tweeting about how, next time, they'd go to
AntennaWeb.org, a site that helps people identify what antenna goes with their TV so they can get over-the-air signals.
But that's child's play. I'm thinking something bigger -- like
tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, or even millions of customers canceling their subscriptions or deciding not to pay their cable bill, meanwhile educating each other on how to find other
ways to get the same programming.
Of course, any organized consumer movement will play out over social media. Now, all the ABCs and Cablevisions of the world need do is listen.