Thanks to a last minute agreement, Innovative Cable will continue to broadcast Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and all the MTV channels, the company announced Wednesday.
Innovative announced earlier this week that Viacom/MTV Networks and the National Cable Telecommunications Cooperative, a national not-for-profit cable TV cooperative that negotiates programming fees for Innovative Cable TV, and Viacom/MTV Networks, were at an impasse and Viacom might cut off access to its programming.
Then Wednesday, Innovative announced it has reached an agreement on carriage fees avoiding a blackout of 17 cable channels.
Although full details of the new agreement will not be immediately released, this deal means that Innovative Cable TV will not lose the satellite feed for the channels in dispute to include the following: MTV, MTV2, MTV Hits, MTV Jams, BET, VH1, VH1 soul, VH1 Classic, CMT, Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, TeenNick, Nick Jr., Comedy Central, TR3s, Spike TV and TV Land.
NCTC and Viacom/MTV Networks had been negotiating around the clock with deadlines being extended on an hourly basis.
Viacom, the parent of MTV Networks, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, was demanding fee hikes that were as much as 40 times the rate of inflation, or roughly 1.1 percent, according to Innovative, which said this increase would have been significantly higher than what larger companies, which can spread their costs over more customers, have been asked to pay.
