A few months back, Dish, our current TV satellite company, informed us that due to some contract dispute, we would no longer receive the local NBC channel from them. It didn't matter that we pay for, and our contract states that we get, all the local broadcast TV channels. No more NBC.
Boo hoo hoo? Naw. We record only one show on NBC, "Chicago Fire." CBS is our main go-to and has been for a lot of years. We've been discovering a lot of interesting options on the upper channels: cooking shows, fishing tournaments, game warden shows like Northwoods Law, zoo shows, old episodes of M*A*S*H, and on and on. Chicago Fire is widely available on at least two other channels as reruns, so Steve set the DVR to record both of them ansd we've been going through the first 9 seasons... over and over and over...
Occasionally we like to follow the large ice skating competitions on NBC, but it turns out that in season, those too are available on the upper channels. So we've been watching them there.
The other night we discovered a channel that was showing the Olympics. We'd thought we might miss those, but we watched an hour of curling before bed and set a bunch of timers on that channel. The next morning, we discovered that NBC was back on good old local channel 12 again! Somehow they had settled their contract dispute. Which was kinda funny since we'd just gone through a whole bunch of channel outtages when AT&T, the parent company, tried cutting Dish off from nearly everything we watched for a couple days. We heard - again on upper channels - that Dish/AT&T lost a lot of customers that first day. We were even looking at our options of cancelling our contract since they weren't delivering and seeing if COX network could offer a decent price. COX is our Wi-Fi provider. Rich though we should get a box like Hulu or one of the others, but we put a hard pause on the discussion before bed because there were just too damn many choices out there and we didn't really want to spend a month getting ourselves acquainted with them all in order to make the "right" decision.
Just over a day later we had our regular programming back anyway. Except for NBC. Of course.
But the Olympics were just barely a day into being broadcast when suddenly NBC was back on our TV. We've got our timers in place, have watched some skiing and some figure skating... and NBC On Demand is letting us binge watch the last season to date of Chicago Fire. We have to put up with commercials, but there is a mute button after all. Besides, it's almost nice to have time set aside for raiding the fridge or taking the dog out or a quick walk down the hall, or.... Not that nice, really, since we always could just hit "pause" and "FF".
But here's my question. Who caved? Did NBC knuckle under because a huge chunk of it's customer base would not be watching the Olympics and Super Bowl, thus helping pay the exorbitant price they shell out for the exclusive rights to them? Or did AT&T knuckle under because they were loosing too many customers after both their dismally successful attempts to piss off its customer base? Which came first?
I wonder if we'll ever know. For that matter, if we'll ever actually care. Just a question for those quiet moments when seven other things aren't grabbing your attention.
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