A new 13-year carriage deal between Rainbow Media Holdings LLC’s AMC and Time Warner Cable gives AMC “favorable” rate and positioning terms, but AMC agreed to pay $74 million in launch-support costs, a securities filing revealed.
A 10-Q quarterly statement filed by Rainbow parent Cablevision Systems Corp. Nov. 9 went beyond earlier statements that merely said AMC and Time Warner had settled legal differences and agreed to a long-term carriage extension.
The filing said the Sept. 29 settlement involved 11 separate agreements, including amendments to existing affiliation agreements and new affiliation and distribution agreements for other Rainbow programming services.
Cablevision’s filing said the amendments included a long-term extension for AMC with “rate and positioning terms that are favorable to AMC.” And AMC will pay $74 million in launch-support costs to Time Warner covering 2005-07.
A Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. analyst report Monday cited the agreement.
In July, a New York State Supreme Court judge ruled in favor of Time Warner’s December 2003 suit against AMC, which claimed that the network’s decision to move from offering classic movies to more contemporary film titles violated its long-term carriage deal with the MSO.
