Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Time Warner about to drop Comedy Central, VH1, 17 others


UPDATE 10:45 PM CT: It's 15 minutes until lights out on the East Coast and "both sides are still talking," a source informs TVB.


UPDATE 9 PM CT: VIACOM PANIC EVERYWHERE, NOT JUST TIME WARNER HOMES! I have just heard from the American Cable Association that its members -- small, mostly mom-and-pop outfits that had nothing to do with today's game of Media Mogul Chicken -- were bombarded with phone calls from concerned customers who thought they were about to lose their cable! "Members from around the country have reported to us that the crawl was displayed on their cable systems, resulting in many concerned calls from customers taking up our members' time, people and money to answer a problem that was not theirs to begin with," said Matthew Polka, president of the association, which reps 1,100 different companies covering just 7 million homes. More about collateral damage below ...


UPDATE - 5 PM CT: Time Warner Cable spokesman Alex Dudley confirming that "the two sides are talking again." This ain't over ...


From the Famous Last Words department ... Remember when I posted that legal notice from Time Warner Cable a couple of weeks ago that showed them dropping all those channels on Jan. 1 and then I wrote, "I doubt Time Warner is going to yank Comedy Central ..."

Well, guess what: TIME WARNER IS GOING TO YANK COMEDY CENTRAL. And VH1, and Spike, and Nick, and MTV, and all those crappy MTV-VH1 digital channels, and Noggin, and TV Land....

The video above was captured this morning at 11 a.m. from Comedy Central on TWC Kansas City. When i tried dialing the supplied phone number, i was repeatedly treated to "(whistle) All circuits are busy!"

Oy vey! What a time for another game of Media Mogul Chicken!

If this thing doesn't resolve by noon, something tells me I'm going to be ringing in 2009 with a front page story....

Because Nikki Finke isn't updating her blog, I'm going to post my story below which those of you who are already up on the whole mess can read -- by the way, note that it's more like 15.7 million homes affected by the blackout -- and then after that, I've got some more about this late-breaking news regarding the amazing collateral damage Viacom has caused today:

More than 15 million customers in systems owned by Time Warner -- including 275,000 in the Kansas City area -- were expected to be without 19 cable channels this morning, including Nickelodeon, MTV, Spike, TV Land, VH1, BET, Comedy Central and others. Viacom, the owner of these networks, is demanding more money from Time Warner, the area's dominant cable provider and a major operator in both New York and Los Angeles. (Part of that total includes the Bright House Networks, part-owned by Time Warner but managed by Advance/Newhouse.)

Programmers and operators often undergo tough negotiations over the price of cable networks, but the brinksmanship on display Wednesday was notable for its ferocity. Viacom greeted the day with an all-out media blitz in print, on TV and the Internet, telling viewers that it would shut off the channels at 12:01 a.m. Thursday and urging them to bombard Time Warner with phone calls. The toll-free technical support number given out by Viacom was frequently so busy on Wednesday that callers heard the "all circuits are busy" message.

Time Warner struck back with angry press releases, including an announcement that Viacom had rejected its request on Wednesday to extend the deadline for striking a new deal.

Previous disputes between programmers and operators have rarely resulted in blackouts such as this one, and those have been typically short-lived.

The message crawl Viacom ran on its channels, which are known collectively as MTV Networks, warned that "starting tonight, you will lose this channel and 18 other channels from your TV ... Don't miss out on your favorite shows. You can stop this!" The crawl then gave out a toll-free technical support number at Time Warner Cable, which was deluged with calls all day Wednesday.

Viacom also took out ads in big-city newspapers warning of a blackout (one ad reportedly featured a crying Dora the Explorer). It installed pop-up ads on its Web sites and created a 30-second commercial featuring sound bites of Colbert, "South Park's" Cartman and other familiar TV characters screaming "Noooooo!!" as an announcer warned that they may be taken off Time Warner.

Viacom's salvo appeared initially to work, as comments on Internet message boards overwhelmingly blamed Time Warner for the fiasco.

"Oh, just give me a reason to drop you, Time Warner!" read a typical comment at Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood blog, which reported that that the two sides hadn't been in contact for days until word of Viacom's PR assault leaked late Tuesday.

If recent history is any guide, however, fans' mood may shift once they begin to hear the other side of the story.

At issue has been a rate increase that Viacom is asking for MTV Networks. Unlike broadcast networks, cable networks collect money from operators who carry them in addition to advertising revenues. Not surprisingly, media companies are looking to operators to make up the double-digit drop in advertising sales in 2008, as sponsors continue to reel from the economic crisis and pull back their marketing budgets.

Time Warner characterized Viacom's demand as a $39 million annual gouging, while Viacom presented it as a 25 cent per month increase per subscriber, an amount it called "modest" and "reasonable." Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt countered that giving in to Viacom's demands would only encourage other powerful interests to step up their demands for compensation. Fox, NBC and Walt Disney all own fistfuls of highly-rated cable channels and have been hit hard by the depressed advertising market.

The ultimate price, Britt warned, will be paid by customers, to whom the rate hikes will have to be passed along.

"Viacom doesn't appear to be interested in what's fair and reasonable for American consumers - they're only interested in propping up their sagging bottom line ..." Britt said Wednesday in a statement.

Viacom countered that its channels eat up 20 percent of Time Warner customers' viewing time but represent less than 3 percent of their cable bill.

"If Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV and the rest of our programming is discontinued - over less than a penny per day - we believe viewers will see this behavior by their cable company as outrageous," read a company statement issued Wednesday.

For now, those channels are absent from the Time Warner lineup. But Viacom may discover why this gambit is used so infrequently -- the only thing predictable is the outcry from upset viewers.

For two years the National Football League has used various media tactics to rally support for its NFL Network, which has also been rebuffed by Time Warner Cable. Fan opinion initially favored the NFL, but as details of the NFL's demands began circulating, fans were more inclined to blame both sides.

Still, Viacom may decide the health of its company depends on extracting larger concessions from the systems that carry its channels. By November Viacom's stock price had tumbled two-thirds from its 52-week high, though Wall Street seemed to think it had the upper hand in its game of chicken with Time Warner, sending its stock climbing on Wednesday.

OK, now more about the fact that Viacom's urgent ALERT ALERT ALERT is running on 98 million cable and satellite households nationwide. Here's something I didn't realize. Lots of cable companies are currently negotiating retransmission agreements, and many of those were going down to the 11th hour, as they usuall do. Retran, as it's called, means getting permission from all the local broadcasters to carry their signals. Usually it involves the cable company giving considerations -- for instance, agreeing to give NBC's cable channels better placement on its systems in exchange for the continued privilege of carrying the local NBC affiliate.

Well, into that process comes this huge poopstorm out of the East. Phones begin ringing off the hook, bewildered customers saying, "You're cutting off Nickelodeon???", bewildered receptionists saying, "What???" and soon everyone in the office is roped into it, because after all, most cable companies in America ain't Time Warner. There's no corporate to bump this up to, no voice-mail hell to consign callers to ...

"Viacom has shown reprehensible judgment today while engaging in what amounts to a national misinformation campaign against thousands of cable operators and millions of subscribers," American Cable Association Chairman and Chief Operating Officer of Wave Broadband, Steve Friedman said. "They seem to have no trouble targeting a specific operator when they refuse to pay higher programming fees and it comes time to turn off their service, so how is it they can't target an operator with a dangerously misleading message like this?"

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

<a href="www.flavorofloveworld.com" target="_blank">Thing 2 Is Faking It</a>

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Flavor Flav Interview

flavor flav talk's about flavor of love new solo album new album with Public Enemy
and a new talk show
Watch Flavor Flav Interview in Music Videos | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Whitney & Ray J back together

Ray J and Whitney Houston

According to PerezHilton, the duo was spotted at Las Vegas’ International airport this week looking content as they exited a private jet. There is something funny about this whole thing though — Ray J aren’t you supposed to be searching for ‘love’ on VH-1 right now….or is that what we like to call searching for a paycheck ? (Flavor Flav picked up three of them thangs on the way back to his baby’s mother)


Thursday, December 4, 2008

here something to know about Public Enemy


IN 1988, Robert Patton-Spruill was a Boston University student who loved AC/DC and thought rap music was little more than fairy floss. Then his best friend gave him a tape of incendiary hip-hop outfit Public Enemy's second album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The hopeful young filmmaker was so taken with what he heard that he blew out the speakers in his car from upping the bass.

"I instantly fell in love," recalls Patton-Spruill, whose documentary Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome is a tidy summation of the seminal group's career and a reminder of how the Long Island line-up completely broke down and then rebuilt rap music in a few cataclysmic years.

"If Malcolm X had a hip-hop group, that would be it," notes Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, one of several enthusiastic talking heads who profess their admiration. But the documentary's real insight comes with the fly-on-the-wall dissection of the relationship between Public Enemy's two distinct rappers: political activist Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour) and now reality show host Flavor Flav (William Drayton jr).

"How does this great intellectual deal with Flav?" asks Patton-Spruill, who spent five years preparing the documentary. "On all these trips we watched them deal with each other, so we showed how they're best friends, but they also work together and they argue like cats and dogs. It's like a very strange marriage — they need and love each other, but they don't always get along."

If Public Enemy were a revelation when they first appeared, with their corrosive production aesthetic, Chuck D's booming baritone and their confrontational stage performances, they have since acquired veteran status. The group will tour Australia again next January, even as the mainstream hip-hop scene continues to favour the self-aggrandisement and commercialisation that emerged in the 1990s.

"Hip-hop was corrupted by the dollar and once record companies realised that they make more money by selling music about hate, death and destruction, that's what they were going to do," laments Patton-Spruill, who himself made several independent films in the 1990s about the black urban experience.

As such, debates with the group's management about what could be included in the film were resolved in a suitably old-fashioned way. "Possession is nine-tenths of ownership," suggests Patton-Spruill. "I don't own it, but I possess all the footage."

Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome screens tonight and next Friday at ACMI.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

SEEZINZ CO-HOSTING WITH 50 CENT ON THE RADIO!

Deelishis and her fiance are over


MediaTakeOut.com has some unfortunate news. Word is that Deelishis from Flavor Of Love fame has officially ended things with her fiance.

Dee is going through some mess right now and if you look at her myspace it says she's single oh well he's gay anyway LOL http://www.myspace.com/londoncharles

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

thing 1 and thing 2 and flavor flav

thing 1 thing 2 and flavor flav part 2

flavor flav is the king of reality tv

VH1 was suffering and stumbled into Reality TV broadcasting through their parent company MTV. They produced a show, The Surreal Life, and invited an aging Rap icon, Flavor Flav, and a B-movie Siren, Brigette Nelson to join the cast. Little did know or ever expect that “ROMANTICAL” flames were going to arise between these two unlikely lovers. Flavor Flav’s flirtations with Nielsen was so mesmerizing that they were given their own show, the Surreal Life 2. After Nielsen leaving Flav teary-eyed and alone, Flavor of Love was hatched in the minds of the producers. And, the genesis of the Flavor of Love Reality TV shows were created, but better yet, it was Flavor Flav that saved a boring and floundering network.

If you like Flav or not, he has changed the landscape of Reality TV in the world. He gets love from Europe, South America, the Tropics, China and down under in Australia. Can Flav be a little ridiculous and outrageous, and kills millions of your brain cells by watching the Flavor of Love shows? Yes. But, he is just an entertainer.


Jiggcasey.com
gives us a glimpse of Flav’s Reality Show Family Tree:

Flavor of Love's Familty Tree

Flav has given to us New York, Deelishis, Hoopz, Myammee, Black, Bootz, Buckeey, Pumpkin, Seezinz, Nibblz and more and more that I care not to mention. New York has her own following. Hoopz wins every Reality TV show she enters. Deelishis has “massive” appeal with her magazine layouts. So does Black, Bootz and Buckeey. Seezinz is “implanting” her way to commericial recognition on the east coast.

Whether we realize it or not, Flav is good for the entertainment business. VH1 realized it and capitalized on his “star” quality. Unfortunately, will Flav be able to capitalize on it as well. He does have 8 mouths to feed. Right!