It's no April Fool's Joke.  Beginning today (April 1, 2014), Cedar Falls Utilities has changed their cable channel line-up.  MTV, VH1, CMT, & Nickelodeon, just to name a few channels, will no longer be available through CFU cable.

CFU's contract with Viacom, the company that owns those channels, on March 31, 2014.  Viacom's new proposed rate would have forced CFU to implement a $3.00 rate hike to its customers.  Cedar Falls Utilities had been trying to negotiate with the network conglomerate, but Viacom would not budge.

During their talks, CFU sent a survey out to its customers.  The explained the potential rate hike, and allowed the customers to vote on whether to keep those channels at a higher rate, or move on.

The decision we’ve made is to replace the cable channels owned by Viacom. Our contract to carry these channels expires today. For the past several weeks we’ve been negotiating to renew these channels as part of a national buying group that combines the bargaining power of more than 700 independent cable companies representing 5.3 million subscribers. We’ve also been gathering customer feedback on this channel group, through a survey mailed to all Basic Plus cable subscribers in February" Cedar Falls Utilities posted to their web site.

In their Basic Plus service, the discontinued channels are MTV, VH1, CMT, Nickelodeon, BET, Comedy Central, Spike and TV Land. In their Signature service, the discontinued channels are CMT Pure, VH1 Classic, VH1 Soul, MTV2, MTV Hits, Nick Jr., Nicktoons and Teen Nick. In their HD Essentials service we will discontinue Palladia.

Even with the strong majority support of our customers, this decision is a tough call. We deeply regret that it will disappoint the group of customers who wanted us to keep these channels."

Replacement channels have been added to the new cable channel line-up.

To read more, visit Cedar Falls Utilities blog site.

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