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Viacom: Comedy Central
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Viacom is a media conglomerate, owning such media properties as Comedy Central, Black Entertainment Network, Country Music Television, Logo, MTV, Nikelodean, Spike, Noggin, and VH1. Headed by the mercurial Sumner Redstone, Viacom is worth in excess of $28B. Of all of it media assets, SpongeBob SquarePants is probably the most emblematic of the Viacom empire. Consequently, henceforth all references to Viacom's “registered copyrighted audiovisual works” shall be anthropomorphized as "SpongeBob".
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Among Viacom's many media holdings on cable television are VH1 and MTV. It owns Nickelodeon and Noggin for children, Black Entertainment Television (BET), Showtime, the Movie Channel, Spike TV for men (formerly TNN), Comedy Central, and Country Music Television (CMT).
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Several months after HBO introduced its Comedy Channel in 1989, Viacom began transmitting HA!, a channel similar in format. Both channels provided comedy programs, but HA! primarily showed episodes of old sitcoms, while the Comedy Channel showed excerpts from sitcoms, movies, and stand-up comedy routines. Both channels started with subscriber bases in the low millions, and most industry analysts believed that only one of them would survive; Viacom management expected to lose as much as $100 million over a three-year period before HA! broke even. The two companies considered merging their comedy offerings, but HBO parent Time Warner would only move forward with the idea if Viacom agreed to settle its $2.4 billion antitrust suit against HBO.
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Under the terms of the affiliation agreements, Viacom's MTV Networks (including Spike TV, Comedy Central, CMT and the MTVN Digital Suite) and the BET Networks will continue to be available on Comcast systems nationwide. Additionally, Comcast will augment its digital suite of services by launching Nicktoons and MTV Hits and increasing the distribution of MTV2, Nickelodeon GAS, VH1 Classic and VH1 Country.
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Viacom has announced a deal with Joost that will see the new P2P-based video start-up "broadcasting" Viacom's music videos, TV shows and other materials on the service. Viacom will provide Joost with content not only from MTV, but ... from BET, Comedy Central, and even movies from Paramount. The news comes less than two weeks after Viacom backed out of talks with YouTube and demanded that their content be removed from the site. YouTube pulled down more than 100,000 videos.
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Viacom, just days after telling Google's YouTube to pull all of its content over copyright problems, is expected to announce a licensing deal with Internet video startup Joost. The deal, reported in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), gives Joost instant heft. Joost has signed up Time Warner Music and now has hundreds of hours of video from MTV, Comedy Central and Spike.
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