Deal reached between Time Warner, MTV Networks

UPDATE 11:48 PM CT: Time Warner has confirmed to me, "We have a deal." MTV, VH1, Comedy, Nick, they're all staying put.

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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.

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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 ...

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

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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....

Talk about a comedown! Radar subscribers offered Star tabloid

I just got a card from the magazine subscription service that handles Radar magazine, which just shut down apparently for good this time. If ever there was a guilty pleasure, it was Radar -- the dinner with O.J., America's worst colleges, 100 things not to say at a job interview, Illeana Douglas ... not to mention great reporting by Friend of TVB John Cook....I'm missing it already!

But look at the three replacements the magazine service has offered me as compensation for the unused portion of my Radar sub (click to enlarge).

Yikes!

I think this calls for a poll.

poll by twiigs.com

Marc Liepis finally moving up

When I first started doing Late Show News almost 15 years ago, I got a nice note from Andy Richter at "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," and thus began a friendly relationship with that show that has never abated. A big reason for that is the host, of course, who keeps putting out a show that I want to watch, but another reason has been the people behind the scenes.

Craig Ferguson is thisclose to Conan in ratings

The gap in total viewers in late night between (number one) CBS and (number four) NBC is (perhaps inevitably) closing to just 50,000 souls watching Conan as opposed to watching Craig. That is not a one-week anamoly, that is a season-to-date number.

Note, as you reading the duelling press releases, that NBC thinks total audience is so 1994.

The short and curious life of MSNBC Films

"Dear Zachary"
on MSNBC

Say this for MSNBC: Love it or hate it -- or in my case both, depending on the day and time -- not many TV channels out there inspire such strong feelings.

But this is not a story about Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or their nemeses Billo, the Manatee or Rick Warren. This is a story about the stuff that MSNBC puts on its air when its celebrity hosts are taking time off. This is when MSNBC acts differently than its rivals, when it acts differently than even its own commercials that tout MSNBC as "The Place for Politics" (and, unofficially, as the official cable-news alternative to Fox).

Looking ahead to 2009

An amusing podcast today with Shari Elliker on WBAL Radio, which we join in progress.

Download WBAL-12-30-2008.mp3

New Year's TV marathons

My main man Charlie has updated his Interesting Pile blog once again with a listing of all the upcoming New Year's TV marathons. Which reminds me I need to post my MSNBC piece that's running tomorrow. Yes, they did it again -- MSNBC told all their top talent to take the week off and are filling the evening hours with ridiculous lookback/lockup fodder because, as we all know, there is no news going on right now. So I finally decided to write about it.

Anyway, here's Charlie's list. My picks: Wednesday, "Spectacle" or if you don't have digicable, "Earth: The Biography" on Nat Geo. Thursday: "American Greed" on CNBC -- say so long to its documentary division!

Wake up and smell the coffee, people!

Kris Ketz of KMBC-9 is filling in for Chris Stigall this morning and booked me as a guest. Guess who slept in.

Well, it made for a pretty entertaining segment, even if the topics were old hat for TVB readers. So listen up and hear what I sound two minutes after Mrs. TVB has woken me with the words, "Aaron? It's KCMO Radio calling?"

I've got the rest of the day off ... well, except for WBAL but then I've got the day off! ...

(download MP3)

Play ball (in more ways than one)!

Time Warner Cable still won't play ball with the NFL -- and believe you me, there is enough blame to go around with that mess -- but it will be a charter member when Major League Baseball's MLB Network signs on Thursday.

Best of all, MLB Net will be standard digital and won't require subscription to a sports tier. Great for us baseball fans....not so great for football fans still out in the cold.

Here are the channel assignments:

Standard Definition--Channel 199

High Definition—Channel 1199

Sounds familiar

The Chicago Tribune has a story today taking note of all the British actors currently using American accents to gain access into the U.S. television and film markets.

I liked the story. And I liked it even more 18 months ago when we all wrote about it at press tour.

Speaking of Joely Richardson, it's time to stop asking when "Nip/Tuck" is coming back and time to start checking your Tivo season pass (Jan. 6).

If you hate professional football....

.... then today's podcast with San Diego professional talk show host Chip Franklin may not be your cuppa joe:

or download

Hey, speaking of pigskin, did you hear that tonight's Alamo Bowl, which is dubbed the "Journalism Bowl" because it pits Northwestern against Missouri, is nowhere near selling out the stadium? Hm, I wonder whyyyyy.

KXTR on FM again ... sorta

If you're like me -- and surveys show you probably aren't -- you've been trying to figure out if this HD Radio thing is for real or not.

I've got an HDR receiver in my car. I got it because my old one went and while I was in Best Buy I saw I could get an Insignia house-brand car stereo with an HDR tuner for "only" 40 bucks extra. I got it. Hey, somebody has to write about it!

Long story short, I love it. The HD sound is somewhere between FM and CD quality, very nice, and it allows multicasting, which Entercom Radio has really taken advantage of in Kansas City and other markets where it owns stations. Case in point, KXTR.

The year in TV in review in your ear

Paul Harris was filling in on the big 550 KTRS in St. Louis last Friday and had me on to go over the year in television, which produced this podcast and sort of an annotated version of this column.

What's working for me this week...

1. "Slumdog Millionaire." Only the company that once owned the rights to the world's biggest game show, then sold them to start a film studio, could pull this off. A brilliant movie -- perhaps not as good for you as "Milk," but filling and tasty.

NBC caught blatantly skewing the news again!!!

Weather Channel Accused of Pro-Weather Bias

It just hasn't been the same since GE took over ...

The Dish Network store - it's not just for skinflints

From the press release pile, here's one that actually taught me something: Satellite TV dealers are a good source of digital converter boxes for people whose TVs aren't DTV-ready. Jack Boring, the local how-can-you-forget-a-name-like-that Dish Network dealer, claims to have "some of the best and most affordable digital-to-analog converter boxes" so your old TV set won't go dark come February 17, 2009, TV Barn's 10th anniversary (and the date when analog TV is supposed to shut down).

Dish Network is the multichannel service for tightwads, so it stands to reason that a lot of Dish subscribers insist on continuing to pull in local TV signals from rabbit ears instead of paying the extra six bucks a month to have Dish Net beam the stations in from their satellite transponders. I haven't tested any of the Boring boxes, but they have to be better than the one I spent my government coupon on.

Btw, the deadline for applying for $40 coupons is New Year's Eve.

A look back at TV's best in '08

Two thousand eight was a momentous year for the nation and the world, so it's little surprise that Nielsen recorded a slight uptick in the amount of television viewing in the average American home. Truthfully, though, democracy's most-relied-upon information source did not exactly knock itself out trying to work off all those advertising dollars that it gorged itself on. Mostly it just opened a window to the most remarkable election of my generation. But that was enough to produce a year's worth of highlights.

FedEx calls time out on Super Bowl

Says Steve Pacheco on the FedEx Citizenship Blog:

FedEx, for the first time in 12 years, will not advertise in the 2009 Super Bowl ...

As a country, we are in unprecedented economic waters. And as a responsible employer of more than 290,000 employees and contractors worldwide, there is a time to justify such an ad spend and a time to step back.

The greatest story ever told (involving cartoon characters)

I think anyone who's covered television for more than about six minutes has written about the making of "A Charlie Brown Christmas," possibly the most beloved TV holiday special ever made. I took a crack at it nine Christmases back for the paper and got to hear Lee Mendelson telling all the great stories he'd perfected over the years about the making of the show, including the legend of how it got sold:

"Coca-Cola called on a Thursday and said, 'We're looking for a new Christmas special,' " recalls Mendelson. "I lied and said we'd been working on one for months. After I hung up I called Schulz and said, 'I think I just sold them "A Charlie Brown Christmas." ' He said, 'What's that?' And I said,'I don't know yet, but they need it Monday.'"

KCPT trims 10% of staff, promises new CEO by March

Kansas City Public Television this week trimmed seven people (one of them a part-timer) from its staff of 75. Contributions are down, and any surplus that former CEO Victor Hogstrom may have left in KCPT's coffers is long gone.

The casualties are "Ruckus" producer Eric Mater, production manager Larry Magariel, pledge producer Diana Hughes, volunteer coordinator Rhonda Johnston, preschool education director Dee Rusconi, Gina Gilbert in the finance department and viewer services coordinator Van Tran.

"Impacted employees have been offered job resource counseling and a severance package in accordance with organizational policy," read a statement passed along to me by KCPT's Kevin Worley. The statement also blamed "current economic conditions" for a drop in giving to Kansas City's only locally owned-and-operated TV station.