Viacom Channels down for a bit

[Mike Richardson]

About 3:50 AM central time all Viacom owned channels except for CBS/UPN locals were down. They came back on several minutes later. It kind of looked like Dish Network had moved the c-band they use to get these channels. MTV was still there but you could barely see it because there was analog static all over it.

WAIT - they just went out again while I was typing this. MTV is the only one with any picture but it's not MTV, it looks like some other channel barely bleeding in, I can't tell what it is though. It's all staticy.

Maintenance?

[Mike Richardson]

Apparantly CSPAN is the channel that's bleeding onto MTV. I can't tell if it's CSPAN 1 or 2, or maybe even 3.

Edit: Looks like CSPAN 2.

[smorg2]

they're down on DirecTV too..

NickE/NickW/MTV/MTV2/VH1/VH1Classic/CMT

-Morgan

[Mike Richardson]

My friend on cable says Nick and MTV don't come in at all. Is Viacom's satellite messed up?

[DCSholtis]

FYI the channels are down for D* subs as well...

[Mike Richardson]

So did Viacom's satellite die, or are they doing some kind of maintenance? I mean, it really shouldn't need maintenance. If they need to add a new channel, they just add it. They don't have to cause downtime to do that.

[Mike Richardson]

MTV came on. The rest are down still.

Edit: DISH Network has some screens on some of the broken channels now that say "Our program provider is experencing some technical difficulties. Please stand by". MTV, NICK, and TNN are on. Rest are static or have the problem slate.

[smorg2]

Anyone think Spike Lee may be sabotaging the Viacom Satellite to stop TNN from becoming SpikeTV?

Although, TNN is still on the air on DirecTV, although that may have something to do with the late night shopping they show...

-Morgan

[smorg2]

MTV came on. The rest are down still.

Edit: DISH Network has some screens on the broken channels now that say "Our program provider is experencing some technical difficulties. Please stand by".

DirecTV has those screens on all of them, MTV still down.

Pretty odd..

They probably just lost $4 million in overnight adverts. ;-)

-Morgan

[smorg2]

[QUOTE=smorg2] MTV still down.

MTV back up

-Morgan

[Mike Richardson]

MTV, NICK, TNN, and TVLand are all up. The rest are either blank, error slate, or in the case of E* and VH1, this odd C-band-ish looking rubbish.

[Mike Richardson]

VH1, MTV2, Showtime East are up. Showtime West is showing the same thing as Showtime East except it has erratic audio. Rest of Showtimes are up except for Showtime Too. All TMCs are up except TMC East and West are the same. Flix is showing strange text. It just flashed with "AVANTI! TEXTLESS 1:20". Now it's showing some odd clouds with no audio.

Nick West is duplicating Nick East?

[Mark Holtz]

I've got AT-150 only.

It still appears that Nick (E*170) and NickW (E*171) are still on the same feed.

Disney has seperate feeds.

Univision & Galavision on 270 and 272 have "We're moving!" as programming information.

The programming on TMC-W (E*329) and TMCX-W (E*330) seem to match the descriptions of TMC-E (E*327).

Encore West is on schedule. Not sure about Encore East.

[Mike Richardson]

Disney, Univision, Galavision, and Encore are not owned by Viacom. I didn't notice any problems on those channels.

Noggin/The-N (169) is now working. The only problems right now are that all Viacom west feeds seem to be mirroring east feeds!

[scaredpoet]

Looks like everything is back to normal as of this morning.

Anyone know what happened?

[Mark Holtz]

From all indications, this was a situation outside Dish's control as it also affectedd DirecTV subscribers as well.

[Mike Richardson]

We know it was out of program providers control. But was there some kind of uplink problem, power problem, physical satellite problem, or what? I find it odd that MTV was showing all this C-bandish static with CSPAN-2 bleeding all over it.

[Mike D-CO5]

This morning Noggin was out on my kid's pvr for a while. Dish said provider problems on the screen.

[Mike Richardson]

Noggin was out the longest originally, it was the last one to come back on after they all went out.

[Jacob S]

That must have explained why the beginning of the top 20 countdown on VH-1 went out Sunday night on my pvr events. It seemed to get a little fuzzy with the signal just like it would with a bigger dish when you do not have the dish fine tuned to the satellite.

[Cyclone]

It appears that the Disney anti-satellite death ray has reached phase two in testing.