It's begun, at least at TWC. Ovation says the MSO is going to drop it when the cable channel's current contract expires on Dec. 31.  Ovation's got a petition drive going on its Web site. I can't recall the last time that sort of thing got a cable MSO to change its mind... chopping the carriage fee? Maybe.   JB

Huh, it surprises me that whether a channel was delivered via dedicated bandwidth or SDV would actually affect its pricing.  I'm not surprised I guess that the MSO's ability to put a channel in an SDV tier would be dictated by the contract they have I guess.  I know some small set of users of these MSOs would receive those SDV channels via TiVo or Windows Media Center or something and require tuning adapters that malfunction etc so they either might not have those channels enabled or be more inclined to ignore them, but the percentages have to be pretty low.

Would be interesting to go through the channel lineup and break the channels out by media company/deal.  Clearly the ones like IFC that aren't in giant tie-ups like Disney/ABC/ESPN need to be looking over their shoulders.

Thanks for the insight. Good point that many of these carriage deals do bundle together multiple channels in the programmer's stable, so MSOs can indeed get stuck with a range of popular and not-so-popular networks, a model that 's worked pretty well for the programmers.

So until that breaks down some, I agree that these threats are somewhat empty at least among poor performers that are baked into much bigger deals. Britt and Rutledge did not mention any networks by name. 

Both of those MSOs use switched digital video, so part of the negotiatons might involve determining if more channels can be offered in a switched tier so the operator doesn't have to keep bandwidth nailed up when no one is watching. That helps to conserve bandwidth, but the MSO is still paying the fee, of course... just maybe less?  I'm not sure how the cost models change for networks offered on SDV versus a perpetual digital broadcast, but thought i'd mention since i did not really factor in how SDV could impact future negotiations involving the least popular networks.   JB

Well, Comcast runs the VOD stuff (CBR, not stat-muxed) at 3.75Mbps SD and >= 15Mbps HD, so say 10 SD and 2.5 HD per 6MHz.  Obviously the stat muxed live channel stuff is going to be higher than that...

Another way of putting this is that as people increasingly turn to HD channels, the willingness of an operator to offer a channel in HD is going to be in question as well.  If you aren't willing to offer say IFC in HD, then a chunk of your viewers are going to be inaccessible to the channel. 

However, given how many channels are part of "packages" served up by large media corporations (e.g. there aren't that many examples like IFC), it isn't all that obvious that MSO's are going to be able to back up these threats.  Did they maybe mention, even under their breath, any channels in particular they'd be thinking of dropping?

Would they ever consider paying for a channel as part of a package but not carrying it?

Still, to clear a 6MHz channel, TW Cable or Charter would  need more than a handful of networks to be in the doghouse... anyone got a sense on what the muxes are these days for SD and HD channels? On HD, i thought we were in the neighborhood of 4, and maybe 12 or more on SD. JB