Millions of US cable viewers may miss Oscars telecast
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Millions of cable viewers in and around New York City could miss Sunday night's Academy Awards broadcast as the Walt Disney Co. pulled the plug to the signals in a dispute with Cablevision System Corp over carriage fees, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Disney, which owns the WABC-TV that provide signal feed to Cablevision, may continue to provide the signal before the Oscar Awards ceremony takes place tonight at Kodak Theater in Hollywood, Los Angeles.
Feuds between programmers and distributors are commonplace, but it is rare for a signal to be yanked, let alone hours before a ratings monster like the Oscars.
The wrangle between Disney and Cablevision over fees led to the blackout affecting more than 3 million customers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the Times reported.
Although the risks are high on both sides of the tug of war -- cable subscribers could defect, and Disney could invoke the ire of advertisers -- family-owned Cablevision has shown little indication of caving in to the pressure, the newspaper said.
Cablevision has said that Disney asks an annual fee amounting to 40 million dollars to allow it to carry WABC, which would translate to about 1 dollar per subscriber per month. Cablevision said it already pays 200 million dollars to Disney to carry its cable networks, including ESPN, Disney Channel and ABC Family.
Disney has denied that figure, though executives have not said how much they want, the Los Angeles Times said.
This is not the first time that Cablevision runs into confrontation against signal providers. Late last year the Time Warner and Fox have cut signal to the network due to another fee dispute. Earlier this year the dispute was resolved and the signal feed has restored.
