If CBS chief Les Moonves is to be believed, CBS was the victor in its month-long dispute with Time Warner Cable. During a conference today, Moonves claimed that CBS took no financial hit after the dispute, while TWC COO Rob Marcus said that it did cost them subscribers.
The two sides finally reached a deal on Sept. 2, exactly a month after CBS stations went dark for 3 million TWC subscribers in Los Angeles , New York and other major markets. CBS had been requesting higher retransmission fees, but financial terms of the deal were not made public.
According to the LA Times, Marcus said at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2013 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference that the fight did cost them subscribers. In 2014, Marcus will take over TWC as chief executive.
“There was a fair amount of pain we had to endure,” Marcus said. “It definitely had a subscriber impact. It increased disconnects and we don’t take that lightly.”
Moonves spoke at the same conference later, and claimed that it the fight isn’t going to cost CBS anything.
“Our national ad dollars did not go down at all,” he said, reports Variety. He added that the next earnings report will show that “there was no harm done financially to the CBS Corporation.”
He continued, “At the end of the day we were fighting for something very important. We need to get paid for retransmission and we need the right to put our content elsewhere. We ended up in a very good position.” Moonves also said that they were confident that the FCC would not get involved.
Deadline notes that, like NBC’s Steve Burke, Moonves believes that Aereo will fail. “Aereo will lose, or the technology just won’t work,” he noted.
image: CBS