Update Wednesday a.m.:
AT&T U-verse dropped the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movie Channel at 12:01 a.m. ET Wednesday in a dispute over fees.
In a statement Wednesday, AT&T said Hallmark owner Crown Media Holdings has not offered a "fair deal."
"We offered to extend the current deal while talks continued, and Hallmark rejected that offer," according to AT&T's statement. "We don't want customers to lose their programming, but we believe strongly that our customers should not have to pay more than their fair share for Hallmark's channels, which is exactly what Hallmark is demanding."
The channels each 2.5 million AT&T U-verse customers.
Crown CEO Bill Abbott said in a statement he was "stunned by (AT&T's) apparent disregard for facts."
The move came as Time Warner Cable and Disney make progress toward resolving their own carriage fee negotiation dispute. The media giants look close to reaching a deal in time for Thursday's college football kickoff, key programming for Disney's ESPN unit.
Negotiations between AT&T and Hallmark broke off Aug. 26. At the time, Abbott accused AT&T of "bullying one of the nation’s last surviving independent cable networks by insisting on unreasonable rates that would seriously jeopardize our longevity."
Crown is willing to restart negotiations at any time, Abbott said Wednesday.
AT&T notified its customers Aug.1 via postcard that the channels might go dark.
Previously:
The current carriage dispute between Disney and Time Warner is nearing a resolution, but the kind of high-stakes brinksmanship the two media giants engaged in throughout this month is here to stay.
Over the past year, debates between cable companies and content providers -- once the province of the board room and the executive suite -- have increasingly played out in the public eye.
As the latest battle demonstrates, it is now de rigueur for media companies to prey on their customers' fears or sympathies.
That can mean anything from dire warnings about big events being missed to attack ads to websites designed to keep customers "informed" of the progress of talks.
“Both sides see the benefit of making disputes public as possible,” Kurt Scherf, an analyst with consumer research firm Parks Associates, told TheWrap. “They’re using the power of social networking and message boards to get out in front of customers”
“It’s a literal game of chicken and both sides have a lot to lose,” said Larry Gerbrandt, a cable analyst and consultant with Media Valuation Partners.
Over the past year, TV watchers have looked on in horror as fights between companies such as Time Warner and Fox, AT&T and Rainbow Media and Disney and Cablevision have threatened to blackout the Oscars or the premieres of hit shows such as “Mad Men.” In most cases, disaster has been averted before the threatened plug pulling -- though the battle between Disney and Cablevision went so far down to the wire that 3 million New York-area homes missed the first 15 minutes of this year's Academy Awards.
