Around 2010, Angelo Carusone was watching Glee when an urgent message ticked across the bottom of his screen. It alerted him and other Long Island viewers that they might soon lose access to the network showing Glee – Fox – and several other Fox channels, and urged them to call their cable company, Cablevision (now Optimum), to demand the company keep Fox.
The issue at hand was a dispute over cable carriage fees: a little-known – and, for Fox, highly lucrative – revenue stream paid by cable companies to television networks in exchange for the rights to broadcast their content. Every three years, cable providers and TV networks agree on a flat, monthly fee that is passed on to the subscriber – and, since cable subscribers generally do not get to choose what channels are part of their cable bundle, that fee is paid regardless of whether or not the subscriber watches a given network.
