By now you probably heard all about the whole fight where ABC pulled Channel 7 from all Cablevision subscribers, only to give the channel back partway through the Academy Awards broadcast. Well, I was one of those Cablevision customers who lost ABC for approximately 20 hours or so, and let me tell you, it was a nightmare. Oh, no, wait, I actually didn’t care either way and was only inconvenienced because every time I turned on the TV the past week I had to see some prerecorded Cablevision propaganda until I could change the channel.

That’s not to say I’m taking ABC’s side in this dustup. No, ABC hasn’t done too much for me lately. I mean, it cancelled Pushing Daisies and Knights of Prosperity, it looks like it’s about to cancel Better Off Ted, and it allowed Scrubs to turn into this. Add that to the fact that it regularly employs Ryan Seacrest and the ghost of Dick Clark every New Year’s Eve and I start to wonder why nobody’s paying me to allow this network into my house.

And yet, I’m no fan of Cablevision either. Why? Because they’re a cable company and by definition cable companies are not to be trusted? Because as a cable company they appear to keep an entire division of people whose only job is to come up with new reasons to charge us for stuff? Because recent scientific research that you can probably read all about somewhere out there on the Internet says that if given a choice between saving a kitten’s life and sucking a quarter out of a subscriber’s pocket, Cablevision would hoover up that quarter like the new girl at the Bunny Ranch? No, no, and while I probably just made that last fact up, I could believe it, but also no. The reason I’m no fan of Cablevision is because it’s owned by the Dolan family who also owns the New York Rangers. Any by “owns”, I mostly mean “has run into the ground”. So as you can see, this fight had me mightily confused.

I mean, choosing a side in this fight is like picking up a Marvel comic to find out it features Dr. Doom vs Dr. Octopus. Or turning on the History Channel and finding a show about Hitler vs Mussolini. Or going to a comedy competition only to discover that it’s all about one post from this blog vs another post vs this blog. In short, there’s no one to root for and everyone loses.

Not that I expect the post-corporate-tantrum spin to play out that way. No, when those articles are written, everyone wins, I’m sure. ABC wins because it got major coverage on competing network news broadcasts and can point to tons of correspondence from people who claim they can’t live without it. And Cablevision wins because it stood up to the big bad network because it loves its customers. And the subscribers win because they won’t miss a second of Dancing With the Stars or Lost or whatever else ABC broadcasts these days. That’s how it’s gonna go, I guarantee it. I’m sure there are plenty of people who totally would’ve missed ABC if it stayed gone, but sometimes I wonder how long it’s been since they had a show worth watching on their schedule.

Just keep in mind that this is the future we’re seeing here. Expect to see more networks and more cable/satellite companies have fights like these. Start learning how to find your shows on the Internet, because more and more that’s where you’re gonna have to go while the big companies fight it out over the billions of dollars that are apparently not enough to make everyone happy. We were promised jet packs in the future. Instead, we get corporate pissing contests. Not a fair trade at all. I think we’re all gonna have to give up on that jet pack dream. Or are we?

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