All of Viacom’s channels, including Spike TV, have now gone dark on DirecTV. The two companies failed to get an agreement worked out regarding carriage fees, meaning that Spike, Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, VH1, CMT and other channels have become unavailable for DirecTV customers. The previous contract expired over the weekend.
“We have absolutely no problem compensating Viacom fairly, but they have now knowingly put our customers in the unreasonable position of either accepting their extravagant financial demands or losing some of their favorite TV shows,” said DirecTV EVP Derek Chang. “We feel our customers should not have to pay more for these networks than the customers of any other TV provider. We reiterated this to Viacom today and have not heard back from them.”
DirecTV added that Viacom demanded the channels get taken down and said, “We asked Viacom to allow us to keep the channels up while we continue to negotiate, but they refused. We’re working diligently on a new agreement to keep making these channels available at a fair price to our customers.”
There is no word on when the agreement might come or if the channels will come back by Thursday for Impact.
