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Time Warner Lifts ABC Blackout
In New York, Houston and Los Angeles, the biggest markets affected by the blackout, ABC returned to the air shortly after the Time Warner announcement.
"We're gratified that Time Warner is now making the viewers their first priority," ABC said in a statement. "As we've been saying, we've been dismayed that they would place their own customers in the middle of a business negotiation."
The move is a temporary one, however. Time Warner is giving ABC and its parent company, the Walt Disney Company, until July 15 to resolve their dispute--so don't toss the rabbit ears just yet.
Like most squabbles of this sort, the battle boils down to money. Disney wants Time Warner to feature its new channels--Toon Disney and a soap-opera channel--and make the Disney Channel part of the basic service packages. Time Warner is cool with the plans, but not the price tag. Time Warner says such a move would increase its costs by more than $300 million.
Industry analysts estimated the blackout could cost ABC a million viewers a day at the worst possible time--the start of May sweeps, the key period when ratings are used to set local advertising rates.
Still, the network still fared pretty well Monday thanks to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Even blacked out in portions of giant markets like New York and L.A. (viewers of New York's WABC-TV got the message "Disney has taken ABC away from you"), the special celebrity version of Millionaire, featuring David Duchovny, Kathie Lee Gifford and Dana Carvey in the hot seat, scorched the competition in the 8 p.m. time slot with an amazing 23.0 rating and a 34 share, ranking just below the Super Bowl and Oscars as the highest-rated show of Y2K.
And while a boon for Time Warner cable subscribers, the lift of the blackout will undoubtedly hurt the sales of TV antennas. When Time Warner pulled the plug on ABC yesterday, the only way viewers could tune in the network was by rigging their sets with antennas, causing a run on rabbit ears.
As one antenna-equipped viewer writes in the alt.tv.game-shows newsgroup: "I just can't miss Millionaire."
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