Cable to Ergen: you go, guy! Operators see political plus in EchoStar/Viacom dispute.(Top of the Week)

Broadcasting & Cable, March, 2004 by Higgins, John M.

Cable operators are gleeful over Charlie Ergen's head-on collision with Viacom. Sure, they hope to steal a few of the EchoStar Communications CEO's subscribers. But they're really cheering his brawl with a powerful programmer. When Ergen took CBS and its big-ticket cable networks dark on his Dish Network for 24 hours last week, a key issue was Viacom's power to yank CBS owned-and-operated stations in a handful of markets.

That ability, in turn, gives it a club for extracting better carriage and more money for its cable networks nationwide. Specifically, if Dish Network wanted consent to retransmit the signals of local CBS and UPN O&Os in 16 markets, where Dish has about 1.6 million subscribers, it would have to pay more if it also wanted its MTV. And...

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